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Copyright, 1889, 
By Helen Campbell. 



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John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



" But laying hands on another 
To coin his labor and sweat, 

He goes in pawn to his victim 
For eternal years in debt" 



TO 



F. W. P. 



THE FRIEND IN WHOM JUSTICE AND TRUTH ARE SO DEEPLY 
IMPLANTED THAT BOTH ARE INSTINCTS, 

AND WHOSE MANHOOD HOLDS THE PROMISE OF WORK THAT 

WILL GO FAR TOWARD FULFILLING THE DEEPEST 

WISH OF THE GENERATION TO WHICH 

THE MAKER OF THESE 

PAGES BELONGS. 



I 



PREFACE. 



HPHE studies which follow, the result of fif- 
teen months' observation abroad, deal 
directly with the workers in all trades open 
to women, though, from causes explained in 
the opening chapter, less from the side of 
actual figures than the preceding volume, 
the material for which was gathered in New 
York. But as months have gone on, it has 
become plain that many minds are also at 
work, the majority on the statistical side of 
the question, and that the ethical one is that 
which demands no less attention. Both are 
essential to understanding and to effort in 
any practical direction, and this is recognized 
more and more as organization brings together 
for consultation the women who, having long 






IV PREFACE. 

felt deeply, are now learning to think and act 
effectually. These pages are for them, and 
mean simply another side-light on the labor 
question, — - the question in which all other 
modern problems are tangled, and whose 
solving waits only the larger light whose first 
gleams are already plain to see. 



HELEN CAMPBELL. 



Heidelberg, Germany, 

October, 1888. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

I. Both Sides of the Sea 7 

II. In Trafalgar Square . 19 

III. The Sweating System in General . . 31~ 

IV. Among the Sweaters 42 

V. Child of the East End 54 

VI. Among the Dressmakers 66 

VII. Nelly, a West End Milliner's Appren- 
tice ."..'. 77 

VIII. London Shirt Makers 90 

IX. The Tale of a Barrow 100 

X. Street Trades among Women .... 112 

XI. London Shop-Girls 122 

XII. From Covent Garden to the Eel-Soup 

Man in the Borough 131 

XIII. Women in General Trades 155 

XIV. French and English Workers .... 167 
XV. French Bargain Counters 176 

XVI. The City of the Sun 184 

XVII. Dressmakers and Milliners in Paris . 194 

XVIII. A Silk Weaver of Paris 203 

XIX. In the Rue Jeanne D'Arc 214 

XX. From France to Italy 224 

XXI. Present and Future 234 



PMSONEBS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 



CHAPTER L 

BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 

\li 7ITH the ending of the set of studies 
among the working-women of New 
York, begun in the early autumn of 1886 and 
continued through several months of 1887, 
came the desire to know something of com- 
parative conditions abroad, and thus be better 
able to answer questions constantly put, as to 
the actual status of women as workers, and 
of their probable future in these directions. 
There were many additional reasons for con- 
tinuing a search, in itself a heart-sickening 
and utterly repellant task. One by one, the 
trades open to women, over ninety in num- 
ber, had given in their returns, some of the 
higher order meaning good wages, steady 



8 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

work and some chance of bettering condi- 
tions. But with the great mass of workers, 
the wages had, from many causes, fallen 
below the point of subsistence, or kept so 
near it that advance was impossible, and the 
worker, even when fairly well trained, faced 
a practically hopeless future. 

The search began with a bias against 
rather than for the worker, and the deter- 
mination to do strictest justice to employer 
as well as employed. Long experience had 
taught what was to be expected from un- 
trained, unskilled laborers, with no ambi- 
tion or power to rise. Approaching the 
subject with the conviction that most of 
the evil admitted to exist must be the re- 
sult of the worker's own defective training 
and inability to make the best and most of 
the wages received, it very soon became 
plain that, while this remained true, deeper 
causes were at work, and that unseen forces 
must be weighed and measured before just 
judgment could be possible. No denunciation 
of grasping employers answered the question 
why they grasped, and why men who in pri- 
vate relations showed warm hearts and the 



BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 9 

tenderest care for those nearest them became 
on the instant, when faced by this problem 
of labor, deaf and blind to the sorrow and 
struggle before them. 

That the system was full of evils was freely 
admitted whenever facts w 7 ere brought home 
and attention compelled. But the easy-going 
American temperament is certain that the 
wrong of to-day will easily become righted 
by to-morrow, and is profoundly sceptical as 
to the existence of any evil of which this is 
not true. 

" It 's pretty bad, yes, I know it 's pretty 
bad," said one large employer of women, and 
his word was the word of many others. "But 
we 're not to blame. I don't want to grind 
'em down. It 's the system that 's w r rong, 
and we are its victims. Competition gets 
worse and worse. Machinery is too much for 
humanity. I've been certain of that for a 
good while, and so, of course, these hands 
have to take the consequences." 

Nothing better indicates the present status 
of the worker than this very phrase " hands." 
Not heads with brains that can think and 
plan, nor souls born to grow into fulness of 



10 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

life, but hands only; hands that can hold 
needle or grasp tool, or follow the order of 
the brain to which they are bond-servants, 
each pulse moving to the throb of the great 
engine which drives all together, but never 
guided by any will of brain or joy of soul in 
the task of the day. There has been a time 
in the story of mankind when hand and brain 
worked together. In every monument of the 
past on this English soil, even at the topmost 
point of springing arch or lofty pillar, is 
tracery and carving as careful and cunning as 
if all eyes were to see and judge it as the 
central point and test of the labor done. 
Has the nineteenth century, with its progress 
and its boast, no possibility of such work from 
any hand of man, and if not, where has the 
spirit that made it vanished, and what hope 
may men share of its return? Not one, if 
the day's work must mean labor in its most 
exhausting form ; for many women, fourteen 
to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the 
nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit 
of bread eaten with it, the exhausted bodies 
falling at last on whatever may do duty for 
bed, with no hope that the rising sun will 



BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. \\ 

bring release from trial or any gleam of a 
better day. 

With each week of the long search the out- 
look became more hopeless. Here was this 
army crowding into the great city, packed 
away in noisome tenement houses, ignorant, 
blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre, and 
yet there as factors in the problem no man 
has yet solved. If this was civilization, better 
barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air, 
free movement and natural growth. What 
barbarism at its worst could hold such joy- 
less, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its 
victims to more lingering deaths? Admitting 
the almost impossibility of making them over, 
incased as they are in ignorance and pre- 
judice, this is simply another count against the 
social order which has accepted such results as 
part of its story, and now looks on, speculating, 
wondering what had better be done about it. 

The philanthropist has endeavored to an- 
swer the question, and sought out many de- 
vices for alleviation, struggling out at last to 
the conviction that prevention must be at- 
tempted, and pausing bewildered before the 
questions involved in prevention. For them 



12 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

there has been active and unceasing work, 
their brooms laboring as vainly as Mrs. Part- 
ington's against the rising tide of woe and 
want and fruitless toil, each wave only the 
forerunner of mightier and more destructive 
ones, while the world has gone its way, cast- 
ing abundant contributions toward the work- 
ers, but denying that there was need for 
agitation or speculation as to where or how 
the next crest might break. There were 
men and women who sounded an alarm, and 
were in most cases either hooted for their 
pains, or set down as sentimentalists, news- 
paper philanthropists, fanatics, socialists, — 
any or all of the various titles bestowed freely 
by those who regard interference with any 
existing order of things as rank blasphemy. 

Money has always been offered freely, but 
money always carries small power with it, save 
for temporary alleviation. The word of the poet 
who has sounded the depths of certain modern 
tendencies holds the truth for this also : — 

"Not that which we give, but what we share, 
For the gift without the giver is bare ; 
Who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three, 
Himself, his hungering neighbor and me." 



BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 13 

Yet it is the Anglo-Saxon conviction, owned 
by English and American in common, and un- 
shaken though one should rise from the dead 
to arraign it, that what money would not do, 
cannot be done, and when money is rejected 
and the appeal made for personal considera- 
tion of the questions involved, there is im- 
patient and instantaneous rejection of the 
responsibility. Evolution is supposed to have 
the matter in charge, and to deal with men in 
the manner best suited to their needs. If the 
ancient creed is still held and the worshipper 
repeats on Sunday : " I believe in one God, 
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
earth," he supplements it on Monday and all 
other days, till Sunday comes again, with the 
new version, the creed of to-day, formulated 
by a man who fights it from hour to hour : 

" I believe in Father Mud, the Almighty Plastic ; 
And in Father Dollar, the Almighty Drastic.' ' 

It is because these men and women must 
be made to understand; because they must 
be reached and made to see and know what 
life may be counted worth living, and how 
far they are responsible for failure to make 



14 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

better ideals the ideal of every soul nearest 
them, that the story of the worker must be 
told over and over again till it has struck 
home. To seek out all phases of wretched- 
ness and want, and bring them face to face 
with those who deny that such want is any- 
thing but a temporary, passing state, due to a 
little over-production and soon to end, is not 
a cheerful task, and it is made less so by 
those who, having never looked for them- 
selves, pronounce all such statements either 
sensational or the work of a morbid and ex- 
cited imagination. The majority decline to 
take time to see for themselves. The few 
who have done so need no further argument, 
and are ready to admit that no words can ex- 
aggerate, or, indeed, ever really tell in full 
the real wretchedness that is plain for all who 
will look. But, even with them, the convic- 
tion remains that it is, after all, a temporary 
state of things, and that all must very shortly 
'come right. 

Day by day, the desire has grown stronger 
to make plain the fact that this is a world- 
wide question, arid one that must be answered. 
It is not for a city here and there, chiefly 



BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 15 

those where emigrants pour in, and so often, 
the mass of unskilled labor, always underpaid, 
and always near starvation. It is for the cities 
everywhere in the world of civilization, and 
because London includes the greatest num- 
bers, these lines are written in London after 
many months of observation among workers 
on this side of the sea, and as the prelude 
to some record of what has been seen and 
heard, and must still be before the record 
ends, not only here, but in one or two rep- 
resentative cities on the continent. London, 
however, deserves and demands chief con- 
sideration, not only because it leads in num- 
bers, but because our own conditions are, in 
many points, an inheritance which crossed the 
sea with the pilgrims, and is in every drop of 
Anglo-Saxon blood. If the glint of the sov- 
ereign and its clink in the pocket are the 
dearest sight and sound to British eyes and 
ears, America has equal affection for her dol- 
lars, in both countries alike chink and glint 
standing with most, for the best things life 
holds. It remains for us to see whether coun- 
teracting influences are stronger here than 
with us, and if the worker's chance is ham- 



16 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

pered more or less by the conditions that 
hedge in all labor. The merely statistical 
side of the question is left, as in the previous 
year's work, chiefly to those who deal only 
with this phase, though drawn upon wherever 
available or necessary. There is, however, 
small supply. Save in scattered trades-union 
reports, an occasional blue book, and here and 
there the work of a private investigator, like 
Mr. Charles Booth, there is nothing which 
has the value of our own reports from the 
various bureaus of labor. The subject has 
until now excited little interest or attention, 
save with a few political economists, and the 
band of agitators who are the disciples, not of 
things as they are, but things as they ought 
to be. One of the most admirable and well- 
officered organizations in New York, " The 
Working woman's Protective Union/' which 
gave invaluable assistance last year, has only 
a small and feeble imitation in London, in 
the Woman's Protective Union, founded by 
Mrs. Peterson, and now under the admirable 
management of Miss Black, but still strug- 
gling for place and recognition. 

Thus it will be seen that the work to be 



BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA, 17 

done here is necessarily more sketchy in char- 
acter, though none the less taken from life in 
every detail, the aim in both cases being the 
same, — to give, as far as possible, the heart 
of the problem as it is seen by the worker, 
as well as by the eyes that may have 
larger interpretation for outward phases. 
The homes and daily lives of the workers are 
the best answers as to the comfort-producing 
power of wages, and in those homes we are 
to find what the wage can do, and what it 
fails to do, not alone for the East End, but 
for swarming lanes and courts in all this 
crowded London. The East End has by no 
means the monopoly, though novelists and 
writers of various orders have chosen it as 
the type of all wretchedness. But London 
wretchedness is very impartially distributed. 
Under the shadow of the beautiful abbey, 
and the towers of archiepiscopal Lambeth 
Palace ; appearing suddenly in the midst of 
the great warehouses, and the press of traffic 
in the city itself, and thronging the streets of 
that borough road, over which the Canter- 
bury pilgrims rode out on that immortal 
summer morning, — everywhere is the swarm 



18 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

of haggard, hungry humanity. No winter of 
any year London has known since the day 
when Roman walls still shut it in, has ever 
held sharper want or more sorrowful need. 
Trafalgar Square has suddenly become a 
world-wide synonym for the saddest sights a 
great city can ever have to show ; and in 
Trafalgar Square our search shall begin, fol- 
lowing one of the unemployed to the refuge 
open to her when work failed. 



CHAPTER II. 

IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 

PO the London mind nothing is more certain 
A than that Trafalgar Square, which may 
be regarded as the real focus of the city, is un- 
rivalled in situation and surroundings. " The 
finest site in Europe/' one hears on every 
side, and there is reason for the faith. In 
spite of the fact that the National Gallery 
which it fronts is a singularly defective and 
unimpressive piece of architecture, it hardly 
weakens the impression, though the traveller 
facing it recalls inevitably a criticism made 
many years ago : " This unhappy structure 
may be said to have everything it ought not 
to have, and nothing which it ought to have. 
It possesses windows without glass, a cupola 
without size, a portico without height, pepper 
boxes without pepper, and the finest site in 
Europe without anything to show upon it." 



20 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

In spite of all this, to which the pilgrim 
must at once agree, the Square itself, with 
the Nelson Pillar and the noble lions at its 
base, nobler for their very simplicity ; its foun- 
tains and its outlook on the beautiful portico 
of St. Martin's, the busy Strand and the great 
buildings rising all about, is all that is claimed 
for it, and the traveller welcomes any chance 
that takes him through it. Treasures of art 
are at its back, and within short radius, every 
possibility of business or pleasure, embodied 
in magnificent hotels, theatres, warehouses, is 
for the throng that flows unceasingly through 
these main arteries of the city's life. 

This is one phase of what may be seen in 
Trafalgar Square. But with early autumn 
and the shortening days and the steadily in- 
creasing pressure of that undercurrent of 
want and misery through which strange 
flotsam and jetsam come to the surface, one 
saw, on the long benches or crouched on the 
asphalt pavement, lines of men and women 
sitting silently, making no appeal to passers- 
by, but, as night fell, crouching lower in their 
thin garments or wrapping old placards or any 
sack or semblance of covering about them, 



IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 21 

losing memory in fitful sleep and waking with 
dawn to a hopeless day. This was the sight 
that Trafalgar Square had for those who 
passed through it, and who at last began 
to question , " Why is it ? Who are they ? 
They don't seem to beg. What does it 
mean ? " 

The Square presently overflowed, and in 
any and every sheltered spot the same silent 
lines lay down at night along the Thames 
Embankment, in any covered court or pas- 
sage, men rushing with early dawn to fight 
for places at the dock gates, breaking arms 
or dislocating shoulders often in the struggle, 
and turning away with pale faces, as they saw 
the hoped-for chance given to a neighbor, to 
carry their tale to the hungry women whose 
office was to wait. The beggars pursued 
their usual course, but it was quite plain 
that these men and women had no affinity 
with them save in rags. Day by day the 
numbers swelled. " Who are they ? What 
does it mean ? " still sounded, and at last 
the right phrase was found, and the answer 
came : " They are the 6 unemployed.' There 
is no longer any work to be had, and these 



22 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

people can neither get away nor find any 
means of living here." 

For a time London would not believe its 
ears. There must be work, and so food for 
whoever was willing to work ; but presently 
this cry silenced, and it became plain that 
somebody must do something. 

Food was the first thought ; and from the 
Limehouse district, and a refuge known as 
the Outcasts' Home, a great van loaded with 
loaves of bread came in two or three times a 
week, taking back to the refuge in the empty 
cart such few as could be induced to try its 
mercies. Coffee was also provided on a few 
occasions ; and as the news spread by means 
of that mysterious telegraphy current in the 
begging fraternity, suddenly the Square over- 
flowed with their kind ; and who w 7 anted to 
work and could not, and who wanted no work 
on any consideration, no man could determine. 

With the story of this tangle, of the bewil- 
derment and dismay for all alike, and the 
increasing despair of the unemployed, this 
chronicle has but indirectly to do. Trafalgar 
Square was emptied at last by means already 
familiar to all. Beggars skulked back to their 



IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 23 

hiding-places like wharf-rats to the rotten piles 
that shelter them ; the unemployed dispersed 
also, showing themselves once more in the files 
that registered when the census of the unem- 
ployed was decided upon ; and then, for the 
most part, were lost to public sight in the 
mass of general, every-day, to-be-expected 
wretchedness which makes up London below 
the surface. 

Scores of wretched figures crouched on the 
icy asphalt of the Square on a pouring night 
early in November, before its clearing had 
been ordered. The great van was expected, 
but had not appeared, and men huddled in 
the most sheltered corners of this most un- 
sheltered spot, cowering under any rag of 
covering they had been able to secure. In 
a corner by the lions a pair had taken refuge, 
— a boy of ten or so, wrapped in two news- 
paper placards, and his bare feet tucked into 
a horse's nose-bag, too old and rotten for any 
further service in its own line of duty ; over 
him crouched a girl, whose bent figure might 
have belonged to eighty, but whose face as she 
looked up showed youth which even her misery 
could not wipe out. She had no beauty, save 



24 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

soft dark eyes and a delicate face, both filled 
with terror as she put one arm over the boy, 
who sprung to his feet. " I '11 not go where 
Nell can't/' he said, the heavy sleep still in 
his eyes ; " we 're goin' to keep together, me 
an' Nell is." 

" 'Tain't the van," the girl said, still hold- 
ing him ; " they tried to take him back to the 
Refuge the other night, and he 's afraid of 
'em. They don't take any over sixteen, and 
so I can't go, an' he 's afraid somehow they'll 
take him in spite of me. I 'd be willin' enough, 
for there 's no more I can do for him, and he 's 
too little for this sort of life ; but he won't go." 

The girl's thin clothing was soaked with 
rain; she shivered as she spoke, but sat there 
with the strange patience in look and manner 
that marks the better class of English poor. 
" But is there nobody to give you a shelter 
on such a night ? You must have somebody. 
What does it mean ? " 

" I had a bit of a place till last Wednesday, 
but the rent was far behind and they turned me 
out. I was home then a day or two, but it 's 
worse there than the streets. There was no 
work, and father drunk, and beating mother 



IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 25 

and all of us, and Billy worst of all ; so the 
streets were better. I 've tried for work, but 
there 's none to be had, and now I 'm waiting. 
Perhaps I shall die pretty soon, and then they 
can take Billy into the Refuge. I 'm waiting 
for that/' 

"But there must be work for any one as 
young and strong as you." 

The girl shook her head. "I've walked 
the soles off me shoes to find it. There ? s no 
work in all London. I can go on the streets, 
but I 'd rather do this. My mother did her 
best for us all, but she 's been knocked round 
till she 's as near death as we. There 's no 
work for man nor woman in all London." 

The boy had settled down at her feet again, 
satisfied that no attempt was to be made 
to separate them, and fell asleep instantly, 
one hand holding her dress. To leave the 
pair was impossible. Other cases might be 
as desperate, but this was nearest ; and pres- 
ently a bargain had been made with an old 
woman who sells roasted chestnuts in St. Mar- 
tin's Lane, close by, and the two were led 
away to her shelter in some rookery in the 
Seven Dials. A day or two later the full 



26 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

story was told, and has its place as the first 
and strongest illustration of the state of 
things in this great city of London, where, 
as the year 1888 opens, official registers hold 
the names of over seventeen thousand men 
w T ho wish to work at any rate that may be 
paid, but for whom there is no work, their 
names representing a total of over fifty thou- 
sand who are slowly starving ; and this mass 
known to be but a part of that which is 
still unregistered, and likely to remain so, un- 
less private enterprise seeks it out in lane 
and alley where it hides. 

The father was a " coal whipper " on the 
docks near Tower Hill, this meaning that he 
spent his days in the hold of a collier or on 
the deck, guiding the coal basket which as- 
cends from the hold through a " way " made 
of broken oars lashed together, and by means 
of a wheel and rope is sent on and emptied. 
Whether in hold or on deck it is one of the 
most exhausting forms of labor, and the men, 
whose throats are lined with coal dust, wash 
them out with floods of beer. Naturally they 
are all intemperate, and the wages taken 
home are small in proportion to their thirst. 



IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 27 

And as an evening solace, the father, who 
had once been footman in a good family, and 
married the lady's maid (which fact accounted 
for the unusual quality of Nelly's English), 
beat them all around, weeping maudlin tears 
over them in the morning, and returning at 
night to duplicate the occasion for more. 

The mother had made constant fight for 
respectability. She did such dressmaking as 
the neighborhood offered, but they moved 
constantly as fortunes grew lower and lower, 
sheltering at last in two rooms in a rookery 
in Tower Hamlets. 

Here came the final disablement. The 
father, a little drunker than usual, pushed 
the wife downstairs and their Billy after her, 
the result being a broken hip for the first and 
a broken arm for the last. Nelly, who had 
begun to stitch sacks not long before, filled 
her place as she could, and cared for the 
other seven, all not much more than babies, 
and most of them in time mercifullv removed 
by death. She was but twelve when her 
responsibility began, and it did not end when 
the mother came home, to be chiefly bedrid- 
den for such days as remained. The three 



28 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

little boys were all " mud-larks/ ' that is, 
prowled along the river shore, picking up any 
odds and ends that could be sold to the rag- 
shop or for firewood, and their backs were 
scored with the strap which the father carried 
in his pocket and took out for his evening's 
occupation when he came. 

The mother, sitting up in bed and knitting 
or crocheting for a small shop near by, fared 
no better than the rest, for Billy, who tried 
to stand between them, only infuriated the 
brute the more. The crisis came when he 
one night stole the strap from his father's 
pocket and cut it into pieces. Nelly, who 
was now earning fair wages, had long thought 
that her mother's life would be easier without 
them ; and now, as Billy announced that he 
had done for himself and must run, she de- 
cided to run too. 

" I told mother I 'd have a bit of a room 
not far off," she said, "only where father 
would n't be likely to search us out, and I 'd 
do for Billy and for her too what I could. 
She cried, but she saw it was best. Billy was 
just a bag of bones and all over strap marks. 
He 'd have to mud-lark just the same, but 



IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 29 

he 'd have more to eat and no beatings, and 
he 'd always hung to me from the time he 
was born. So that is the way I did, and, bit 
by bit, I got a comfortable place, and had 
Billy in school, and kept us both, and did well. 
But then the wages began to go down, and 
every week they got lower till, where I 'd 
earned twelve shillings a week sometimes, I 
was down to half and less than half that. I 
tried stitching for the sweaters a while, but 
I 'd no machine, and they had more hands 
than they wanted everywhere, and I went 
back to the sacks. And at last they dis- 
missed a lot too, and I went here and there 
and everywhere for another chance, and not 
one, — not one anywhere. I pawned every- 
thing, bit by bit, till we'd nothing left but 
some rags and straw to sleep upon, and the 
rent far behind ; and then I went home when 
we were turned out, and that father took for 
his chance, and was worse than ever. 

"And so, when there was no work any- 
where, though I was ready for anything, I 
did n't care what, and I saw we were just tak- 
ing the bread from mother's mouth (though 
it's little enough she wanted), then I told 



30 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

Billy to stay with her, and I went out and 
to the Square and sat down with the rest, and 
wondered if I ought to sit there and wait 
to be dead, or if I had n't the right to do it 
quicker and just try the river. But I saw 
all those I was with just as bad off and worse, 
and some with babies, and so I did n't know 
what to do, but just to wait there. What 
can we do ? They say the Queen is going to 
order work so that the men can get wages ; 
but they don't say if she is going to do any- 
thing for the women. She 's a woman ; but 
then I suppose a Queen couldn't any way 
know, except by hearsay, that women really 
starve ; and women do for men first anyhow. 
But I will work any way at anything, if only 
you'll find it for me to do- — if only you 
will." 

For one of the fifty-three thousand work 
and place have been found. For the rest is 
still the cry : " I will work any way at any- 
thing, if only you '11 find it for me to do ; if 
only you will." 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SWEATING SYSTEM I1ST GENERAL. 

« TJ ISTORY repeats itself," is a very hack- 
neyed phrase, yet, for want of any 
better or more expressive one, must lead such 
words as are to be said on an old yet ever 
new evil ; for it is just forty years ago, since 
the winter of 1847-1848 showed among the 
working men and women of England con- 
ditions analogous to those of the present, 
though on a far smaller scale. Acute distress 
prevailed then as now. Revolution was in 
the air, and what it might mean being far less 
plain to apprehensive minds than it is to-day, 
a London newspaper, desirous of knowing just 
what dangers were to be faced, sent a com- 
missioner to investigate the actual conditions 
of the working classes, and published his re- 
ports from day to day. Then, for the first 
time, a new word came into circulation, and 



32 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

" sweating " became the synonym, which it 
has since remained, for a system of labor 
which means the maximum of profit for the 
employer and the minimum of wages for the 
employed. The term is hardly scientific, yet 
it is the only one recognized in the most 
scientific investigation thus far made. That of 
1847-1848 did its work for the time, nor have 
its results wholly passed away. Charles Kings- 
ley, young then and ardent, his soul stirred 
with longing to lighten all human suffering, 
took up the cause of the worker, and in his 
pamphlet u Cheap Clothes and Nasty," and 
later, in the powerful novel " Alton Locke," 
showed every phase of the system, then in its 
infancy, and, practically, entirely unknown on 
the other side of the Atlantic. 

The results of this agitation became visible 
at once. Unions and Associations of various 
sorts among tailors and the one or two other 
trades to which the sweating system had ap- 
plied, were organized and from year to year 
extended and perfected till it had come to be 
the popular conviction that, save in isolated 
cases here and there, the evil was to be found 
only among the foreign population, and even 



THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. 33 

there, hedged in and shorn of its worst possi- 
bilities. This conviction remained and made 
part of the estimate of any complaints that 
now and then arose, and though the work of 
the organized charities, and of independent 
investigations here and there, demonstrated 
from year to year that it had increased 
steadily, its real scope was still unbelieved. 
Now, after forty years, the story tells itself 
again, this time in ways which cannot be set 
down as newspaper sensationalism or any- 
body's desire to make political capital. It is 
a Blue Book which holds the latest researches 
and conclusions, and Blue Books are not part 
of the popular reading, but are usually tucked 
away in government offices or libraries, to 
which the public has practically no access. 
A newspaper paragraph gives its readers the 
information that another report on this or 
that feature of public interest has been pre- 
pared and shelved for posterity, and there the 
matter ends. 

In the present case public feeling and in- 
terest have been so stirred by the condition 
of unexampled misery and want among 
masses eager to work but with no work to be 

3 



34 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

had, that the report has been called for and 
read and discussed to a degree unknown to 
any of its predecessors. While it gives re- 
sults only in the most compact form and by 
no means compares with work like that of 
Mr. Charles Peck in his investigations for the 
New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor, it 
still holds a mass of information invaluable to 
all who are seeking light on the cause of pres- 
ent evils. As with us the system is closely a 
part of the manufacture of cheap clothing of 
every order, tailoring leading, and various 
other trades being included, furniture makers, 
strange to say, being among the chief suf- 
ferers in these. 

With us the system is so clearly defined 
and so well known, at any rate in all our 
large centres of labor, that definition is hardly 
necessary. For England and America alike 
the sweater is simply a sub-contractor who, at 
home or in small workshops, undertakes to do 
work, which he in turn sublets to other con- 
tractors, or has done under his own eyes. 
The business had a simple and natural begin- 
ning, the journey-worker of fifty years ago 
taking home from his employers work to be 



THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. 35 

done there either by himself or some member 
of his family. At this time it held decided 
advantages for both sides. The master-tailor 
was relieved from finding workshop accom- 
modations with all the accompanying expense 
and from constant supervision of his work 
people, while good work was insured by the 
pride of the worker in his craft, as well as his 
desire not to lose a good connection. There 
was but the slightest subdivision of labor, 
each worker was able to make the garment 
from the beginning to the end, apprentices 
being employed on the least important parts. 
Work of this order has no further place in 
the clothing trade, whether tailoring or gen- 
eral outfitting, save for the best order of 
clothing. Increase of population cheapened 
material, the introduction of machinery and 
the tremendous growth of the ready-made 
clothing trade are all responsible for the 
change. The minutest system of subdivided 
labor now rules here as in all trades. When 
a coat is in question, it is no longer the master- 
tailor, journeyman and apprentices who pre- 
pare it, but a legion of cutters, basters, 
machinists, pressers, fellers, button-hole, and 



36 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

general workers, who find the learning of 
any one alone of the branches an easy matter, 
and so rush into the trade, the fiercest and 
most incessant competition being the instant 
result. 

In 1881 a census was taken in the East End 
of London which showed over fifteen thousand 
tailors at work, of whom more than nine thou- 
sand were women. The number of the latter at 
present is estimated to be about twelve thou- 
sand, much increase having been prevented 
by various causes, for which there is no room 
here. As the matter at present stands, every 
man and woman employed aims to become as 
fast as possible a sweater on his or her own 
account. For large employers this is not so 
easy ; for the small ones nothing could be 
simpler, and here are the methods. 

If the trade is an unfamiliar one, there is 
first the initiation by employment in a sweat- 
er's shop, and a few months, or even weeks, 
gives all the necessary facility. Then comes 
the question of workroom ; and here it is only 
necessary to take the family room, and hire a 
sewing machine, which is for rent at two shil- 
lings and sixpence, or sixty cents, a week. To 



THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. 37 

organize the establishment all that is neces- 
sary is a baster, a machinist, a presser, and 
two or three women-workers, one for button- 
holing, one for felling, and one for general 
work, carrying home, etc. The baster may 
be a skilled woman ; the presser is always a 
man, the irons weighing from seven to eigh- 
teen pounds, and the work being of the most 
exhausting description, no man being able to 
continue it beyond eight or ten years at the 
utmost. The sw^eater-employer often begins 
by being his own presser, or his own baster ; 
but as business increases his personal labor 
lessens. In the beginning his profits are ex- 
tremely small, prices varying so that it is im- 
possible to make any general table of rates. 
Even in the same branch of trade hardly any 
two persons are employed at the same rate, 
and the range of ability appears to vary with 
the wage paid, subdivision of labor being thus 
carried to its utmost limit, and the sections of 
the divisions already mentioned being again 
subdivided beyond further possibility. So 
tremendous is the competition for work that 
the sweaters are played off against each other 
by the contractors and sub-contractors, the 



38 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

result upon the workers below being as dis- 
astrous as the general effect of the system 
as a whole. 

As one becomes familiar with the charac- 
teristics of the East End, — and this is only 
after long and persistent comings and goings 
in street and alley, — it is found that there are 
entire streets in Whitechapel or St. George's- 
in-the-East, the points where the tailoring 
trade seems to focus, in which almost every 
house contains one, and sometimes several, 
sweating establishments, managed usually by 
men, but now and then in the hands of 
women, though only for the cheapest forms 
of clothing. Here, precisely as in our own 
large cities, a room nine or ten feet square 
is heated by a coke fire for the presser's 
irons, and lighted at night by flaming gas- 
jets, six, eight, or even a dozen workers being 
crowded in this narrow space. But such 
crowding is worse here than with us, for 
reasons which affect also every form of cheap 
labor within doors. London, under its pres- 
ent arrangements, is simply an enormous 
smoke factory, and no quarter of its vast 
expanse is free from the plague of soot and 



THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. 39 

smoke, forever ftying, and leaving a coating 
of grime on every article owned or used, no 
matter how cared for. This is true for Bel- 
gravia as for the East End, and "blacks/' as 
the flakes of soot are known, are eaten and 
drunk and breathed by everything that walks 
in London streets or breathes London air. 

There is, then, not only the foulness engen- 
dered by human lungs breathing in the nar- 
rowest and most crowded of quarters, but the 
added foulness of dirt of every degree and 
order, overlaid and penetrated by this deposit 
of fine soot ; the result a griminess that has 
no counterpart on the face of the earth. 
" Cheap clothes and nasty " did not end 
with Kingsley's time, and these garments, 
well made, and sold at a rate inconceivably 
low, are saturated with horrible emanations 
of every sort, and to the buyer who stops 
to think must carry an atmosphere that ends 
any satisfaction in the cheapness. Setting 
aside this phase as an intangible and, in 
part, sentimental ground for complaint, the 
fact that the cheapness depends also upon 
the number of hours given by the worker 
— whose day is never less than fourteen, and 



40 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

often eighteen, hours — should be sufficient to 
ban the whole trade. Even for this longest 
day there is no uniformity of price, and with 
articles identically the same the rate varies 
with different sweaters, the increasing com- 
petition accentuating these differences more 
and more. The sweater himself is more or 
less at the mercy of the contractor, who says 
to him : " Here are so many coats, at so 
much a coat. If you won't do them at the 
price, there are plenty that will/' 

Already well aware of this fact, the sweater, 
if the rate falls at all below his expectation, 
has simply to pursue the same course with 
the waiting worker in his shop, a slight turn 
of the screw, half a penny off here and a far- 
thing there, bringing his own profit back to 
the rate he assumes as essential. There is 
no pressure from below to compel justice. 
For any rebellious worker a dozen stand 
waiting to fill the vacant place ; and thus 
the wrong perpetuates itself, and the sweater, 
whose personal relation with those he em- 
ploys may be of the friendliest, becomes ty- 
rant and oppressor, not of his own will, but 
through sheer force of circumstances. Thus 



THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. 41 

evils, which laws have not reached, increase 
from day to day. Inspectors are practically 
powerless, and the shameful system, degrad- 
ing alike to employer and employed, grows 
by what it feeds on, and hangs over the East 
End, a pall blacker and fouler than the cloud 
of smoke and soot, also the result of man's 
folly, not to be lifted till human eyes see 
clearer what makes life worth living, and 
human hands are less weary with labor that 
profiteth not, but that deadens sense and soul 
alike. 

This is the general view of the system as a 
whole. For the special there must still be a 
further word. 



CHAPTER IV. 

AMONG THE SWEATERS. 

" ' 1\J ^"^ tailors to make a man/ they say. 
Well, now if it takes that amount, and 
from some lots I 've seen I should say it did, 
you 've got to multiply by nine again if you 
count in the women. Bless your 'art ! " 
and here, in his excitement, the inspector be- 
gan to drop the ^'s, which the Board School 
had taught him to hold to with painful te- 
nacity. " Bless your 'art! a woman can't make 
a coat, and every tailor knows it, and that 's 
one reason 'e beats 'er down and beats 'er 
down till 'ow she keeps the breath of life in 
the Lord only knows. Take the cheapest 
coat going and there 's a knack to every 
seam that a woman don't catch. She 's good 
for trousers and finishing, and she can't be 
matched for button-holes when she gives her 
mind to it, but a coat 's beyond her. I 've 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 43 

wondered a good bit over it. The women 
don't see it themselves, but now and again 
there 's one that 's up to every dodge but a 
coat seam, and she wants more money and 
could n't be persuaded, no, not if Moses him- 
self came to try it, that she is n't worth the 
same as the men. That 's what I 'ear as I go, 
and I 've been hup and down among 'em three 
years and over. Their dodges is beyond be- 
lief, not the women's, — poor souls! they're 
too ground down to 'ave mind enough left for 
dodges, — but the sweaters; Parliament's after 
'em. There 's enough, but ther 's no man 
halive that I've seen that knows how to 'old a 
sweater to 'em. How 's one or two inspectors 
to get through every sweating place in White- 
chapel alone, let alone hall the East End? It's 
hup an' down an' hin and hout, and where you 
find 'em fair and square in a reg'lar shop, or 
in rooms plain to see, you '11 find 'em in base- 
ments and backyards, and washhouses, and 
underground, — anywheres like so many rats, 
though, I 'm blessed if I don't think the rats 
has the hadvantage. Now, the law says no 
working over hours, and I go along in the 
evening, about knocking-off time, and find 



44 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

everything all clear only a look in the 
sweater's heye that I know well enough. 
It means most likely that 'e 's got 'is wo- 
men locked up in a bedroom where the 
Parliament won't let me go, and that when 
my back 's turned 'e '11 'ave 'em out, and 
grin in his sleeve at me and Parliament too. 
Or else 'e 's agreed with 'em to come at six in 
the morning instead of eight. It 's a twelve- 
hour day 'e 's a right to, from eight to eight, 
but that way he make it fourteen and more, 
if I or some other inspector don't appear 
along. 

"Now, suppose I drop down unexpected, — 
an' that's the way, — before I've made three 
calls, and likely nailed every one in the house 
for violation, it 's dow r n the street like lighte- 
ning that the hinspector 's after 'em. Then 
the women are 'ustled out anywhere, into the 
yard, or in a dust bin. Lift up 'most anything 
and you 'd find a woman under it. I 've 
caught 'em w r ith their thimbles on, hot with 
sewing, and now they drop 'em into their 
pockets or anywhere. They 'd lose a job if 
they peeped, and so there 's never much 
to be done for 'em. But why a woman 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 45 

can't make a coat is what I study over. 
Did you ever think it out, ma'am ? Is it 
their 'ands or their heyes that isn't hup 
to it?" 

This position of the little inspector's prob- 
lem must wait, though in it is involved that 
fatal want of training for either eye or hand 
which makes the lowest place the only one 
that the average needle-woman can fill. Their 
endurance equals that of the men, and often, 
in sudden presses of work, as for a foreign 
order, work has begun at seven o'clock on a 
morning and continued right on through the 
night and up to four or five of the next after- 
noon. The law demands an hour for dinner 
and half an hour for tea, but the first is halved 
or quartered, and the last taken between the 
stitches, but with no more stop than is ne- 
cessary for swallowing. The penalties for 
violation of these acts are heavy and the in- 
spectors work very thoroughly, various con- 
victions having been obtained in 1886, the 
penalties varying from two pounds to ten 
pounds and costs. But the sweaters, though 
standing in terror of such possibility, have 
learned every device of evasion, and, as be- 



46 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

fore stated, the women necessarily abet them 
for fear of losing work altogether. 

Let us see now what the profit of the aver- 
age sweater is likely to be, and then that of 
the workwoman, skilled and unskilled, taking 
our figures in every case from the Blue Book 
containing Mr. Burnett's report and confirmed 
by many workers. A small sweater in Bruns- 
wick Street employed a presser and a machi- 
nist, with two women for button-holes and 
felling, his business being the production of 
tunics for postmen. For each of these he re- 
ceived two shillings, or half a dollar a coat, 
which he considered a very good price. He 
paid his presser 4s. Qd. ($1.12) per day; his 
machinist, 5s. ($1.25) ; his button-holer 2$. 6 d. 
(60c), from which she must find twist and 
thread; and the feller Is. 3d. (30c), a total 
of thirteen shillings threepence. For twelve 
coats he received twenty-four shillings, his 
own profit thus being ten shillings and nine- 
pence ($2.68) for his own labor as baster and 
for finding thread, soap, coke, and machine. 
The hours were from seven in the morning 
to ten in the evening, less time not sufficing 
to finish the dozen coats, this bringing the 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 47 

rate of wages for the highest paid worker to 
4^c7., or nine cents an hour. For the small 
sweater the profit is slight, but each addi- 
tional machine sends it up, till four or five 
mean a handsome return. If work is slack, 
he has another method of lessening expenses, 
and thus increasing profits, arranging matters 
so that all the work is done the three last days 
of the week, starting on a Thursday morning, 
for instance, and pressing the workers on for 
thirty-three to thirty-six hours at a stretch, 
calling this two days' work, and paying for it 
at this rate. If they work fractions of a day, 
eight hours is called a half and four a quarter 
day, and the men submit with the same pa- 
tience as the women. 

For the former this is in part a question 
of nationality, the sweater's workmen being 
made up chiefly of German and Polish Jews 
and the poorer foreign element. An English 
worker has generally learned the trade as a 
whole, and is secure of better place and pay ; 
but a Polish Jew, a carpenter at home, goes 
at once into a sweater's shop, and after a few 
weeks has learned one branch of the trade, 
and is enrolled on the list of workers. For 



48 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

the women, however, there is a smaller pro- 
portion comparatively of foreigners. The 
poor Englishwoman, like the poor American, 
has no resource save her needle or some form 
of machine work. If ambitious, she learns 
button-holing, and in some cases makes as 
high as thirty shillings per week ($7.50). 
This, however, is only for the best paid 
work. Out of this she must find her own 
materials, which can never be less than two 
and sixpence (60c). A woman of this 
order would do in a day twelve coats with 
six button-holes each, for the best class of 
work getting a penny a hole, or two cents. 
For commoner kinds the prices are a descend- 
ing scale : three-quarters of a penny a hole, 
half a penny, eight holes for threepence, and 
the commonest kinds three holes for a penny. 
These are the rates for coats. For waistcoats 
the price is usually a penny for four button- 
holes, a skilled worker making sixteen in an 
hour. Many of these button -hole makers 
have become sweaters on their own account, 
and display quite as much ingenuity at cut- 
ting rates as the men at whose hands they 
may themselves have suffered. 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 49 

For the machinists and fellers the rates 
vary. A good machinist may earn five shil- 
lings a day ($1.25), but this only in the busy 
season ; the feller, at the best, can seldom go 
beyond three or four, and at the worst earns 
but six or eight per week ; while learners and 
general hands make from two to six shillings 
a week, much of their time being spent in 
carrying work between the shops and the 
warehouses. Six shillings a week represents 
a purchasing power of about forty cents a 
day, half of which must be reserved for rent ; 
and thus it will be seen that the English 
workwoman of the lower grade is in much 
the same condition as the American worker, 
hours, wages, and results being nearly identi- 
cal. The Jewish women and girls represent a 
formidable element to contend with, as they 
are now coming over in great numbers, and the 
question has so organized itself that each falls 
almost at once into her own place, and works 
with machine-like regularity and efficiency. 

In one of the houses in a narrow little 
street opening off from Whitechapel, were 
three women whose cases may be cited as 
representative ones. The first was a trouser 



50 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

machinist, and took her work from another 
woman, a sweater, who had it from city and 
other houses. She was paid threepence 
(6c.) a pair, and could do ten pairs a day, 
if she got up at six and worked till ten or 
eleven, which was her usual custom. In the 
next room was a woman who stitched very 
thick large trousers, for which she received 
fourpence a pair. She also had them from a 
woman who took them from a sub-contractor. 
She could make six and sometimes seven shil- 
lings a week, her rent being two shillings and 
sixpence. On the floor above was a waistcoat 
maker, who, when work was brisk, could earn 
eight and sometimes nine shillings a week ; 
but who now, as work was slack, seldom went 
beyond six or seven. Out of this must be 
taken thread, which she got for eightpence a 
dozen. She worked for a small exporter in 
a street some ten minutes' walk away; but 
often had to spend two hours or more taking 
back her work and waiting for more to be 
given out. She fared better than some, how- 
ever, as she knew women who many a time 
had had to lose five or six hours — " just so 
much bread out of their mouths.' ' 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 51 

" The work has to be passed/' she said, 
"and there's never any doubt about mine, 
because I was bound to the trade, and my 
mother paid a pound for premium, and I 
worked three months for nothing — two 
months of that was clear gain to them, for 
I took to it and learned quick. But it's a 
starvation trade now, whatever it used to 
be." 

" Why don 't some of the best workers 
among you combine and get your work di- 
rect from the city house ? " 

" I 've 'ad that in me mind, but there 's 
never money enough. There 's a deposit to 
be made for guarantee, and the machine-rent 
and all. No, there 's never money enough. 
It's just keeping soul and body together, and 
barely that. We don't see butcher's meat 
half a dozen times a year; it's tea and bread, 
and you lose your relish for much of anything 
else, unless sprats maybe, or a taste of shrimps. 
I was in one workshop a while where there 
was over-hours always, and one night the in- 
spector happened along after hours, and no 
word passed down, and the man turned me 
into the yard and turned off the gas ; but I 



52 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

had to work two hours after he was gone. 
I'm better off than the woman in the next 
room. She makes children's suits — coats and 
knickerbockers — for ha'penny a piece, with 
tuppence for finishing, and her cotton to find ; 
and, do 'er best, she won't make over four 
shillings and threepence a week, sometimes 
less. There's a mother and daughter next 
door that were bound to their trade for three 
months, and the daughter gave three months' 
work to learn it ; but the most they make on 
children's suits is eight shillings and sixpence 
the two, and they work fifteen and sixteen 
hours a day." 

This record of a house or two in White- 
chapel is the record of street after street in 
working London. No trade into which the 
needle enters has escaped the system which 
has been perfected little by little till there 
is no loophole by which the lower order of 
worker can escape. The sweaters themselves 
are often kind-hearted men, ground by the 
system, but soon losing any sensitiveness ; and 
the mass of eager applicants are constantly 
reinforced, not only by the steady pressure 
of emigrants of all nations, but by an influx 



AMONG THE SWEATERS. 53 

from the country. In short, conditions are 
generally the same for London as New York, 
but intensified for the former by the enormous 
numbers, and the fact that outlying spaces do 
not mean a better chance. This problem of 
one great city is the problem of all ; and in 
each and all the sweater stands as an integral 
part of modern civilization. Often far less 
guilty than he is counted to be, and often as 
much a sufferer as his workers from those 
above him, his mission has legitimate place 
only where ignorant and incompetent work- 
ers must be kept in order, and may well give 
place to factory labor. With skill comes or- 
ganization and the power to claim better 
wages; and with both skilled labor and co- 
operation the sweater has no further place, 
and is transformed to foreman or superin- 
tendent. Till this is accomplished, the word 
must stand, as it does to-day, for all imagin- 
able evil that can hedge about both worker 
and work. 



CHAPTER V. 

CHILD OF THE EAST END. 

" \I7HAT is it to be a lady ? " The voice 
* * was the voice of a small and ex- 
ceedingly grimy child, who held in her arms 
one still smaller and even grimier, known to 
the neighborhood as " Wemock's Orlando." 
Under ordinary circumstances, neither Wem- 
ock's nor anybody's youngest could have ex- 
cited the least attention in Tower Hamlets 
where every doorway and passage swarms 
with children. But Orlando had the proud 
distinction of having spent three months of 
his short life in hospital, "summat wrong 
with his inside " having resulted from the 
kick of a drunken father who objected to the 
sight or sound of the children he had brought 
into the world, these at present numbering 
but seven, four having been mercifully re- 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 55 

moved from further dispensation of strap and 
fist and heavy boot. 

Such sympathy as the over-worked drudges 
who constituted the wives of the neighbor- 
hood had to spare, had concentrated on Or- 
lando, whose " inside " still continued wrong, 
and who, though almost three, had never been 
able to bear his weight on his feet, but be- 
came livid at once, if the experiment was 
tried, — a fact of perennial interest to the 
entire alley. 

Wemock's fury at this state of things was 
something indescribable. A "casual" at the 
Docks, with the uncertainty of work which is 
the destruction of the casual laborer, he re- 
garded the children as simply a species of in- 
vestment, slow of making any return, but 
certain in the end. Up to five, say, they 
must be fed and housed somehow, but from 
five on a boy of any spirit ought to begin a 
career as mud-lark to graduate from it in 
time into' anything for which this foundation 
had fitted him. The girls were less avail- 
able, and he blessed his stars that there were 
but three, and cursed them as he reflected 
that Polly was tied hand and foot to Orlando, 



56 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

who persisted in living, and equally persisted 
in clinging to Polly, who mothered him more 
thoroughly than any previous Wemoek had 
been. 

Not that the actual mother had not some 
gleams of tenderness, at least for the babies. 
But life weighed heavily against any demon- 
stration. She was simply a beast of burden, 
patient, and making small complaint, and 
adding to the intermittent family income in 
any way she could, — charing, tailoring, or 
sack-making when the machine was not in 
pawn, and standing in deadly terror of Wem- 
ock's fist. The casual, like most of the lower 
order of laborers, has small opinion of women 
as a class, and meets any remonstrance from 
them as to his habits with an unvarying 
formula. 

" I 'm yer 'usban', ain't I ? " is the reply to 
request or objection alike, and "husband " by 
the casual is defined as " a man with a right 
to knock his woman down when he likes." 
This simplifies responsibility, and, being ac- 
cepted with little or no question by the 
women, allows great latitude of action. 

Wemoek had learned that the strap was 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 57 

safer than a knock-down, however, as a dose 
of it overnight did not hinder his wife from 
crawling out of bed to prepare the breakfast 
and get to work, whereas a kick such as he 
preferred, had been known to disable her for 
a week, with inconvenient results as to his 
own dinners and suppers. 

" It 's the liquor as does it. 'E 's peaceable 
enough when the liquor's out of 'im. But 
their 'ands comes so 'eavy. They don't know 
how 'eavy their 'ands comes." Thus Mrs. 
Wemock, standing in the doorway, for the 
moment holding Orlando, who resented his 
transfer with a subdued howl of grief, and 
looked anxiously down the alley toward 
Polly's retreating figure. 

" 'Ush now an' ma '11 give him a winkle. 
Polly 's gone for winkles. It 's winkles we '11 
'ave for supper, and a blessing it 's there 's 
one thing cheap and with some taste to it. 
A penny-'orth even, goes quite a way, but a 
penny-'orth ain't much when there 's a child 
to each winkle an' may be two." 

" The churchyard 's been a better friend to 
me than to you," said a thin and haggard- 
looking woman, who had come across the 



58 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

street for a look at Orlando. " Out of my 
seventeen, there ain't but six left an' one 
o' them is in the Colonies. There's small call 
to wish 'em alive, when there's nought but 
sorrow ahead. If we was ladies I suppose it 
might all be different." 

It was at this point that Polly's question 
was heard,— Polly, who had rushed back with 
the winkles and put the dish into her mothers 
hand and caught Orlando as if she had been 
separated from him hours instead of minutes. 
And Orlando in turn put his skinny little 
arms about her neck. Whatever might be 
wrong with his inside, the malady had not 
reached his heart, which beat only for Polly, 
his great dark eyes, hollow with suffering, 
fixing themselves on her face with a sort of 
adoration. 

" A lady? " Mrs. Wemock said reflectively, 
eying her winkles, " there 's more than one 
kind, Polly. A lady's mostly one that has 
nought to do but what she likes, and goes in 
a carriage for fear she '11 soil her feet. But 
I 've seen real ladies that thought on the poor, 
and was in and out among 'em. That kind is 
'ard to find, Polly. I never knew but two an' 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 59 

they 're both dead. It 's them as has money, 
that's ladies, and them that hasn't — why 
they isn't." 

" Then I can't be a lady/' said Polly. " I 
heard Nelly Anderson say she meant to be a 
lady." 

" Lord keep you from that kind ! " said the 
mother hastily, with a significant look at her 
neighbor, which Polly did not fail to note 
and puzzle over. Tending Orlando gave her 
much time for puzzling. She was known as 
an " old fashioned " child, with ways quite 
her own, always to be depended upon, and 
confiding in no one but Orlando, who an- 
swered her in a language of his own. 

" When I am a lady, we will go away some- 
where together," Polly said. " I think I shall 
be a lady sometime, Orlando, and then we '11 
have good times. There are good times 
somewhere, only they don't get into the Build- 
ings," and with a look at the sooty walls and 
the dirty passage she followed her mother 
slowly up the stairs, and took her three 
winkles and the big slice of bread and drip- 
ping, which she and Orlando were to share, 
into the corner. Orlando must be coaxed to 



60 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

eat, which was always a work of time, and be- 
fore her own share had been swallowed, her 
father's step was on the stairs, and her mother 
turned round from the machine. 

" Keep out of the way, Polly. ? E 's taken 
too much, I know by the step of 'im, and 'e 
won't 'alf know what he 's about." 

Polly shrunk back. There was no time to 
get under the bed, which she often did, and 
she hugged Orlando close and waited fear- 
fully. Both were silent, but she put her 
bread behind her. To see them eating some- 
times enraged him, and he had been known to 
fling loaf and teapot both from the windows. 

Both were on the table now, two or three 
slices spread with dripping for the younger 
boys who would presently come in. Wemock 
sat down, his hands in his pockets and his 
legs stretched out to their utmost length, and 
looked first at his wife who was stitching 
trousers, and then at Polly, whose eyes were 
fixed upon him. 

"I'll teach you to look at me like that, 
you brat," he said, rising slowly. 

" For the Lord's sake, Wemock ! " his wife 
cried, for there was deeper mischief than 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 61 

usual in his tone. " Remember what you did 
to Orlando." 

" I '11 do for him again. I 've 'ad enough 
of him always hunder foot. Out o' the way, 
you fool." 

Polly looked toward the door. A beating 
for herself could be taken, but never for Or- 
lando. Her mother had come between, and 
she saw her father strike her heavily, and 
then push her into the chair. 

" Go on with your trousers/' he said. 
" There 's no money at the Docks, and these 
children eating me out of house and home. 
A man might be master of his own. Come 
'ere. You won't, won't you ? Then — " 

There were oaths and a shriek from Or- 
lando, on whom the strap had fallen ; and 
then Polly, still holding him, rushed for the 
door, only to be caught back and held, while 
the heavy fist came down with cruel weight. 

u Wemock 's a bit worse than common," 
they said in the next room as the sounds be- 
gan ; but the shrieks in another moment had 
drawn every one in the Buildings, and the 
doorway filled with faces, no one volunteer- 
ing, however, to interfere with the Briton's 






62 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

right to deal with his own as he will. He 
had flung Polly from him, and she lay on the 
floor unconscious and bleeding. Orlando had 
crept under the bed, and lay there paralyzed 
with terror; and the mother shrieked so 
loudly that the brute slunk back and seated 
himself again with attempted indifference. 

" You've done for yourself this time/' a 
neighbor said, and Wemock sprang up, too late 
to escape the policemen who had been brought 
by the sounds, not usual in broad daylight, and 
who suddenly had their hands upon him, while 
another stooped doubtfully over the child. 

" She 's alive," he said. " They take a deal 
to kill 'em, such do, but she '11 need the 'os- 
pital. Her arm \s broke." 

He lifted the arm as he spoke, and it fell 
limp, a cry of pain coming from the child, 
whose eyes had opened a moment and then 
closed with a look of death on the face. An 
ambulance was passing. Some one had been 
hurt on the Docks, where accidents are always 
happening, and was being carried to the hos- 
pital ; and a neighbor ran down. 

" It 's best to do it sudden," she said, " or 
Orlando '11 never let her go or her mother 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 63 

either/' and she hailed the ambulance driver, 
who objected to taking two, but agreed when 
he found it was only a child. 

Polly came to herself at last, gasping w T ith 
pain. A broken arm was the least of it. 
There was a broken rib as well, and bruises 
innumerable. But worse than any pain was 
the separation from Orlando, for whom Polly 
wailed, till, in despair, the nurse promised to 
speak to the surgeon and see if he might not 
be brought ; and, satisfied with this hope, the 
child lay quiet and waited. 

She was in a clean bed, — such a bed as she 
had never seen, and her soft dark eyes ex- 
amined the nurse and all the strange sur- 
roundings in the intervals of pain. But fever 
came soon, and in long days of unconscious 
murmurings and tossings, all that was left of 
Polly's thin little frame wasted away. 

" It is a hopeless case," the doctor said, 
"though after all with children you can never 
tell." " 

There came a day when Polly opened her 
eyes, quite conscious, and looked up once 
more at the nurse with the old appeal. 

" I want Orlando. Where 's Orlando ? " 



64 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

" He can't come/' the nurse said, after a 
moment, in which she turned away. 

" You promised/' Polly said faintly. 

" I know it/' the nurse said. " He should 
come if he could, but he can't." 

" Is he sick ? " Polly said after a pause. 
" Did father hurt him ? " 

"Yes, he hurt him. He hurt him very 
much, but he can never hurt him any more. 
Orlando is dead." 

Polly lay quite silent, nor did her face 
change as she heard the words; but a smile 
came presently, and her eyes lightened. 

" You did n't know/' she said. " Orlando 
has come. He is right here, and some- 
body is carrying him. He is putting out his 
arms." 

The child had raised herself, and looked 
eagerly toward the foot of the bed, " She is 
bringing him to me. She says, 'Polly, you 
're going to be a lady and never do what you 
don't want to any more.' I thought I should 
be a lady sometime, because I wanted to so 
much ; but I did n't think it would be so soon. 
They won't know me in the Buildings. I 'm 
going to be a lady, and never — " 



CHILD OF THE EAST END. 65 

Polly's eyes had closed. She fell back. 
What she had seen no man could know, but 
the smile stayed. 

It was quite certain that something at least 
had come to her of what she wanted. 



CHAPTER VI. 

AMONG THE DKESSMAKEKS. 

" AN Englishman's house is his castle/ ' and 
an Englishwoman's no less, and both 
he and she ward off intruders with an energy 
inherited from the days when all men were 
fighters, and intensified by generations of 
practice. Even a government inspector is 
looked upon with deep disfavor as one result 
of the demoralization brought about by lib- 
eral and other loose ways of viewing public 
rights. The private, self-constituted one, it 
may then be judged rightly, is regarded as a 
meddlesome and pestilent busybody seeking 
knowledge which nobody should wish to ob- 
tain, and another illustration of what the 
nineteenth century is coming to. Various 
committees of inquiry, from the Organized 
Charities and from private bodies of workers, 
visit manufactories and industries in general, 



AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS. 67 

where women are employed, to make it evident 
that there is a desire to know how they fare. 
Why this wish has arisen, and why things are 
not allowed to remain as the fathers left 
them, are two questions at present distracting 
the British employer's mind, and likely, before 
the inquiry is ended, to distract it more, as, 
day by day, the numbers increase of those 
who persist in believing that they are in 
some degree their brothers' keepers, — a doc- 
trine questioned ever since the story of time 
began. Obstacles of every nature are placed 
in the way of legalized inspection, and evasion 
and subterfuge, masterly enough to furnish a 
congress of diplomatists with ideas, are in 
daily practice. Years of experience make 
the inspector no less astute, and so the war 
goes on. 

It will be seen then, what difficulties hedge 
about the private inquirer, who must go 
armed with every obtainable guarantee, and 
even then leave the field quite conscious that 
the informants are chuckling over a series of 
misleading statements, and that not much 
will be made of that case. So little onmniza- 
tion exists among the workers themselves, 



68 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

and there is such deadly fear of losing a 
place that women and girls listen silently to 
statements, which they denounce afterwards 
as absolutely false. Natural as this is, — and it 
is one of the inevitable results of the system, — 
it is one of the worst obstacles in the way, not 
only of inquiry but any statements of results. 

" Of course he lied or she lied," they say, 
"but don't for anything in the world let 
them know that we said so or that you know 
anything about it." 

This injunction, which for the individual 
worker's sake must be scrupulously attended 
to, hampers not only inquiry but reform, and 
delays still further the attempts at organiza- 
tion made here and there. The system ap- 
plied to dressmaking, our present topic, 
differs from anything known in America skve 
in one of its phases, and merits some descrip- 
tion, representing as it does some lingering 
remnant of the old apprentice system. 

For the West End there is generally but one 
method. And here it may be said that the 
West End ignores absolutely any knowledge 
of what the East End methods may be. Be- 
tween them there is a great gulf fixed, and 



AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS. 69 

the poorest apprentice of a West End house 
regards herself as infinitely superior to the 
mistress of an East End business. For this 
charmed region of the West, whether large 
or small, has spent years in building up a 
reputation, and this is a portion of the guar- 
antee that goes with the worker, who has 
learned her trade under their auspices. It is 
a slow process, — so slow, that the system is 
not likely to be adopted by hasty Americans. 
In a first-class house in the West End, Oxford 
and Regent Streets having almost a monop- 
oly of this title, the premium demanded for 
an apprentice is from forty to sixty pounds. 
This makes her what is known as an " indoor 
apprentice,'' and entitles her to board and 
lodgings for two years. Numbers are taken 
at once, beds are set close together in the 
rooms provided, and board is made of the 
cheapest, to prevent loss. This would seem 
very small, but add to it the fact, that the 
apprentice gives from twelve to sixteen hours 
a day of time and a year of time as assistant 
after the first probation is past, and it will be 
seen, that, even with no fee, the house is 
hardly likely to lose much. 



70 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

The out-door apprentices pay usually ten 
pounds and board and lodge at home, but 
hours are the same ; never less than twelve, 
and in the busy season, fourteen and sixteen. 
Tea is furnished them once a day, but no 
food, nor is there definite time for meals. In 
the case of in-door apprentices, with any rush 
of work, a supper is provided at ten, but the 
" out-doors " must bring such food as is 
needed. For them there is, as for learners, no 
pay for over-time ; and the strain often costs 
the life of the country girls unused to con- 
finement, who fall into quick consumption, in- 
duced not only by long hours of sitting bent 
over work, but by breathing air foul with the 
vile gas and want of ventilation, as well as, in 
many cases, the worst possible sanitary con- 
ditions. If the initiatory period is safely past, 
the apprentice becomes an " improver ; " that 
is, she is allowed larger choice of work, looks 
on or even tries her own hand when draping 
is to be done, and if quick is shortly ranked 
as an assistant. With this stage comes a 
small wage. An out-door apprentice now 
earns from four to five shillings ($1.25) a 
week. The in-door one still receives only 



AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS. 71 

board, but soon graduates from second to 
first assistant, though the whole process re- 
quires not less than four years and is often 
made to cover six. As first assistant she is 
likely to have quarters slightly more comfort- 
able than those of the apprentices, and she 
receives one pound a week, — often less, but 
never more. In case of over-time, this mean- 
ing anything over the twelve hours which is 
regarded as a day's work, various rates are 
paid. In the mourning department of one of 
the best known Oxford Street establishments, 
fourpence an hour is allowed. This rate is ex- 
ceptionally high, being given because of the 
objection to evening work on black. The 
same house pays in the colored-suit depart- 
ment two and a half pence (5c.) an hour, and 
provides tea for the hands. Twopence an 
hour is given in several other houses, but for 
the majority nothing whatever. 

The forewoman of one of these establish- 
ments began as an apprentice something over 
thirty years ago, and in giving these details 
and many others not included, expressed her 
own surprise that the amount of agitation as to 
over-time had produced so little tangible result. 



72 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

"The houses are on the lookout, it's true/' 
she said ; " and each one is afraid of getting 
into the papers for violating the law, so the 
apprentice is looked out for a little better 
than she was in my time. I 've worked many 
a time when there was a press of work — 
some sudden order to be filled — all night 
long. They gave us plenty of tea, a hot 
supper at ten, and something else at two, but 
they never paid a farthing, and it never came 
to one of us that we 'd any right to ask it. 
There was one — ■ a plucky little woman and 
a splendid hand. She was first assistant and 
we 'd been going on like this a week one 
year. The girls fell fainting from their 
chairs. I did myself though I was used to it ; 
and she stood up there at midnight, just be- 
fore the manager came in and said, ' Girls, 
you've no right to take another stitch with- 
out pay. Who 11 stand by me if I say so 
when Mr. B. comes in.' Not one spoke. 
' Oh, you cowards ! ' she said. ' Not one ? 
Then I '11 speak for you.' Two rose up then 
and threw down their work. ' 'Tis a burning 
shame/ says they. ' Say what you like V Mr. 
B. was there before the words were out of 



AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS. 73 

their mouths, ' What 's this ? what 's this ? ' 
he said. ' Not at work and the order to go 
out at noon ? ' ' Pay us then for double work, 
and not drive us like galley slaves/ said Mrs. 
Colman, standing very straight, ' I speak for 
myself and for the rest. We are going 
home.' 

" The manager got purple. ' The first one 
that leaves this room, by G — , she '11 never 
come back. What do you mean getting up 
this row, damn you V 'I mean we 're earn- 
ing double, and ought to have it. Why 
should n't our pockets hold some of the pro- 
fits on this order as well as yours ? ' c Will 
you hush ? ' he says with his hand up as if 
he 'd strike. ' No ; not now, nor ever/ she 
says, she white and he purple, and out she 
walked ; but none followed her. She never 
came back, and she was marked from that 
time, so she found it hard to get work. But 
she married again and went out to the Col- 
onies, so she had n't to fight longer. It 's 
over-time now, as much as then, that is the 
greatest trouble. We had a Mutual Improve- 
ment Society when I was young, but oh, what 
hard work it was to go to it after nine in the 



74 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

evening and try to work, and it 's hard work 
now, though people think you can be as brisk 
and wide awake after sewing twelve hours as 
if you 'd been enjoying yourself." 

In 1875 a few dressmakers, who had 
observed intelligently various organizations 
among men-tailors, boot-makers, etc., started 
an association of the " dressmakers, milliners, 
and mantua makers/' designed for mutual 
benefit, a subscription of twopence per week 
being added to a small entrance fee, Eules 
were drawn up, one or two of which are 
given illustratively. 

" Each person on joining is required to pay one 
penny for a copy of the rules, one penny for a card 
on which her payments will be entered, and one 
shilling entrance fee — but the last may be paid by 
instalments of fourpence each. After thirty years 
of age the entrance fee shall be 6d. extra for every 
additional ten years. 

" Members not working in a business house, or 
not working in the above trades, can only claim 
sick benefits, but the usual death levy shall also be 
made for them. 

" In case of death each member will be called 
upon to contribute sixpence to be expended as the 
deceased member may have directed. 



AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS. 75 

" When a member is disabled by sickness (except- 
ing in confinements), a notice must be signed by 
two members as vouchers to the secretary, who 
shall appoint the member living nearest to the sick 
member, with one member of the committee, to 
visit her weekly, and report to the committee be- 
fore the allowance is paid, unless special circum- 
stances require a relaxation of this rule. The 
committee may require a medical certificate." 

Excellent as every provision was, and admir- 
able work as was accomplished, the women, as 
is too often the case with women, lost mutual 
confidence, or could not be made to see the 
advantage of paying punctually, and the asso- 
ciation dwindled down to a mere handful. In 
1878 it reorganized, and its secretary, a work- 
ing dressmaker, who learned her trade in a 
West End house, has labored in unwearied 
fashion to bring about some esprit du corps 
and though often baffled, speaks courageously 
still of the better time coming when women 
will have some sense of the value of organiza- 
tion. Her word confirms the facts gathered 
at many points in both East and West End. 
The East has reduced wages to starvation 
limit. A pound a week can still be earned in 



76 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

some houses at the West End — though four- 
teen or sixteen shillings is more usual; but 
for the other side, fourteen is still the highest 
point, and the scale descends to five and six 
— in one case to three and sixpence. Over 
hours, scanty food, exhaustion, wasting sick- 
ness, and death, the friend at last, when the 
weary days are done ; — this is the day for 
most. The American worker has distinct 
advantages on her side, the long unpaid 
apprenticeship here having no counterpart 
there, and the frightfully long working day 
being also shortened. Many other disabili- 
ties are the same, but in this trade the ad- 
vantage thus far is wholly for the American 
worker. 



CHAPTEE VII. 

NELLY, A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE. 

\\7 HAT Polly had heard, listening silently, 
with " Wemock's Orlando " held close 
in her small arms, was quite true. Nelly San- 
derson had determined to be a lady, and 
though uncertain as yet as to how it was to 
be brought about, felt that it must come. 
This she had made up her mind to when 
not much older than Polly, and the desire 
had grown with her. It was perfectly plain 
from the difference between her and Jim 
that Nature had meant her for something 
better than to stitch shirt-bodies endlessly. 
At twelve she had begun to do this, portions 
of two or three previous years having been 
spent in a Board School. Then her time for 
work and contribution to the family support 
had come. She was only a " feller," and took 
her weekly bundle of work from a woman, 



78 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

who, in turn, had it from another woman, 
who took it from a master-sweater, who dealt 
directly with the great city houses ; and be- 
tween them all, Nelly's wage was kept at 
the lowest point. But she did her work 
well, and was quick to a marvel; and her 
hope for the future carried her on through 
the monotonous days, broken only by her 
mother's scolding and Jim's insolence. 

Jim was the typical East End loafer, — a 
bullet head, closely cropped ; dull round eyes, 
and fat nose, also rounded ; a thick neck, and 
fat cheeks, in which were plainly to be seen 
the overdoses of beer and spirits he had drunk 
since he was ten or twelve years old. 

His mother had tried to keep him respect- 
able. She had been a lady's maid ; but that 
portion of her life was buried in mystery. It 
was only known she had come to Norwood 
Street when Nelly was a baby, and that very 
shortly Judkins, a young omnibus conductor, 
had fallen in love with her; and they had 
married, and taken rooms, and lived very 
comfortably tills Jim was three or four years 
old. But the taste for liquor was too strong: 
and long days in fog and rain, chilled to the 



A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE. 79 

marrow under the swollen gray clouds of the 
London winter, were some excuse for the rush 
to the " public " at the end of each trip. The 
day's wages at last were all swallowed, and 
the wife, like a good proportion of workmen's 
wives, found herself chief bread-winner, and 
tried first one trade and then another, till 
Nelly's quick fingers grew serviceable. 

Nelly was pretty, — more than pretty. 
Even Jim had moments of admiration ; and 
the Buildings, in which several of her ad- 
mirers lived, had seen unending fights as to 
who had the best right to take her out on 
Sundays. Her waving red-brown hair, her 
great eyes matching it in tint to a shade, 
her long black lashes and delicate brows, the 
low white forehead and clear pale cheeks, — - 
anybody could see that these were far and 
away beyond any girl in the Buildings. 
The lips were too full, and the nose no par- 
ticular shape ; but the quick-moving, slender 
figure, like her mother's, and the delicate 
hands, which Nelly hated to soil, and kept 
as carefully as possible, — all these were in- 
dications over which the women, in conclave 
over tea and shrimps, shook their heads. 



80 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

66 ' Er father was a gentleman, that 's plain 
to see. She '11 go the same way her mother 
did. I 'd not 'ave one of my hown boys take 
up with her, not for no money." 

This seemed the general verdict in the 
Buildings; and though Nelly sewed stead- 
ily all day and every day, the women still 
held to it, the men hotly contesting it, and 
family quarrels over the subject confirming 
the impression. Nelly worked on, however, 
unmoved by criticism or approval, spending 
all that could be saved from the housekeeping 
on the most stylish clothes to be found in 
Petticoat Lane market, and denying herself 
even in these for the sake of a little hoard, 
which accumulated, oh ! so slowly since it 
had been broken into, once for a new feather 
for her little hat, once for a day's pleasuring 
at Greenwich ; and Nelly resolved firmly it 
should never happen again. 

One ambition filled her. This hateful East 
End must be left somehow. Somehow she 
must get to be the lady which she felt sure 
she ought to be. There were hints of this 
sometimes in her mother's talk ; but it was 
plain that there was nobody to help her to 



A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE. 81 

this but herself. Already Jim drank more 
than his share. He was going the way of 
his father, dead years before in a drunken 
frolic j and the income made from the little 
shop her mother had opened, to teach him 
how to make a living, covered expenses, and 
not much more. Whatever was done for 
Nelly must be done by herself. 

The way had opened, or begun to open, at 
Greenwich. A tall, delicate girl, who proved 
to be a milliner's apprentice, had taken a 
fancy to her, and given her her first real 
knowledge of the delights of West End life. 
She had nearly ended her apprenticeship, and 
would soon be a regular hand ; and Nelly 
listened entranced to the description of mar- 
vellous hats and bonnets, and the people who 
tried them on, and looked disgustingly at her 
own. 

" You 've got a touch, I know," the new 
friend said approvingly. " You'd get on. 
Is n't there anybody to pay the premium for 

you?" 

Nelly shook her head sorrowfully. " They 
could n't do without me," she said. "There 's 
mother and Jim, that won't try to earn any- 



82 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

thing, and I stitch now twelve hours a day. 
I'm off shirts, and on trousers. Trousers 
pay better. I've made eighteen shillings a 
week sometimes, but you must keep at it 
steady ahead for that." 

"It's a pity," her companion said re- 
flectively. "You'd learn quick. In three 
months you'd be an improver, and begin 
to earn, and then there 's no knowing where 
you 'd stop. You might get to be owner." 

Nelly turned suddenly. She had felt for 
some time that some one was listening to 
them. They were on the boat, sitting on 
the central seat, back to back with a row 
of merry-makers; but this was some one 
different. 

"I beg your pardon," he said; and Nelly 
flushed with pleasure at a tone no one had 
ever used before. "I have heard a little 
you were saying. I am interested in this 
question of wages, and very anxious to know 
more about it. I wish you would tell me 
what you know about this stitching." 

He had come round to their side — a tall 
blond man of thirty, dressed in light gray, 
and a note-book in his hand. He was so 



A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE. 83 

serious and gentle that it was impossible to 
take offence, and very soon Nelly was telling 
him all she knew of prices in cheap clothing 
of every sort, and how the workers lived. 
She hated it all, — the grime and sordidness, 
the drunken men and screaming children ; 
and her eyes flashed as she talked of it, and 
a flush came to her cheeks. 

"You ought to have something better," 
the young man said presently, his eyes fixed 
upon her. " We must try to find something 
better." 

Nelly's companion smiled significantly, but 
he did not notice it. Evidently he was un- 
like most of the gentlemen she had seen in 
the West End. Yet he certainly was a gen- 
tleman. He took them to a small restaurant 
when Nelly had answered all his questions, 
and they dined sumptuously, or so it seemed 
to them, and he sat by them and told stories, 
and entertained them generally all the way 
home. 

" I shall go down the river next Sunday," 
he said low to Nelly as they landed. "Do 
you like to row ? If you do, come to Chelsea 
to the Bridge, and we will try it from there." 



84 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

This was the beginning, and for many 
weeks it meant simply that he pleased his 
aesthetic sense, as well as convinced himself 
that he was doing a good and righteous 
deed in making life brighter for an East 
End toiler. He had given her the premium, 
and Nelly, without any actual lie, had con- 
vinced her mother that the West End milli- 
ner was willing to take her for only two 
months of time given, and then begin wages. 
She brought out her own little fund, swollen 
by several shillings taken from one of the 
sovereigns given her, and proved that there 
was enough here to keep them till she began 
to earn wages again; and Mrs. Judkins al- 
lowed herself at last to be persuaded, feeling 
that a chance had come for the girl which 
must not be allowed to pass. 

So Nelly's apprenticeship began. There 
was less rose-color than she had imagined. 
The hours were long, longer sometimes than 
her stitching had been, and many of the 
girls looked at her jealously. But Maria, 
her first friend, remained her friend. The 
two sat side by side, and Nelly caught the 
knack by instinct almost, and even in the 



A WEST-END MILLINERS APPRENTICE. 85 

first week or two caught a smile from Ma- 
dame, who paused to consider the twist of 
a bow, quite Parisian in its effect, and said 
to herself that here was a hand who would 
prove valuable. 

Nelly went home triumphant that night, 
and even her mother's sour face relaxed. 
She had taken up trouser-stitching again, 
forcing Jim to mind the shop, and saying 
to herself that the family fortunes were going 
to mend, and that Nelly would do it. Sun- 
days were always free. Nobody questioned 
the girl. The young men in the Buildings 
and the street gave up pursuit. Plainly 
Nelly was not for them, but had found her 
proper place in the West End. They bowed 
sarcastically, and said, "'Ow's your Royal 
Tghness ? " when they met ; but Nelly hardly 
heeded them. The long wish had taken 
shape at last, — she was going to be a lady. 

Summer ended. There was no more boat- 
ing, but there were still long walks and ex- 
cursions. The apprenticeship was over, and 
Nelly was now a regular hand, and farther 
advanced than many who had worked a year 
or two. She made good wages, often a pound 



86 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

a week. Her dress was all that such a shop 
demanded ; her manner quieter every day. 

" She's a lady, that's plain/' Maria said; 
and Madame agreed with her, and took the 
girl more and more into favor. Nelly had a 
little room of her own now, next to Maria. 
She seldom went home, save to take money 
to her mother, and she never stayed long. 

" It 's best not," Mrs. Judkins said. " You 're 
bound for something better, and you '11 get it. 
This isn't your place. You're a bit pale, 
Nelly. It 's the hours and the close room, I 
suppose ? " 

" Yes; it 's the hours," Nelly said. " When 
there *s a press, we 're often kept on till nine 
or ten ; but it 's a good place." 

She lingered to-day till Jim came in. Jim 
grew worse and worse, and she hurried away 
as she saw him swaggering toward the door ; 
but there were tears in her eyes as she turned 
away. She passed her friend of the summer 
in Regent Street, and looked back for a mo- 
ment. He had nodded, but was talking busily 
with a tall mail, who eyed Nelly sharply. She 
had found that he lived in Chelsea, and was a 
literary man of some sort, — she hardly knew 



A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE. 87 

what, — and that his name was Stanley ; be- 
yond this she knew nothing. Some day he 
would make her a lady, — but when ? There 
was need of haste. No one knew how great 
need. 

Another month or two, the winter well 
upon them, and there came a day when 
Madame, who, as Nelly entered the work- 
room, had stopped for a moment and looked 
at her, first in surprise, then in furious anger, 
burst out upon her in words that scorched 
the ears to hear. No girl like that need sit 
down among decent girls. March, and never 
show her shameful face again. 

Nelly rose silently, and took down her hat 
and shawl, and as silently went out, Madame's 
shrill voice still sounding. What should she 
do ? The end was near. She could not go 
home. She must find Herbert, and tell him ; 
but he would not be at home before night. 
She knew his number now, and how to find 
him. He must make it all right. She went 
into Hyde Park and walked about, and when 
she grew too cold, into a cocoa-room, and so 
the day wore away ; and at five she took a 
Chelsea omnibus, and leaned back in the 



88 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

corner thinking what to say„ The place was 
easily found, and she knocked, with her heart 
beating heavily, and her voice trembling as 
a maid opened the door and looked at her a 
moment. 

" Come this way," she said, certain it must 
be a lady, — a visitor from the country, per- 
haps; and Nelly followed her into a back 
drawing-room, where a lady sat with a baby 
on her lap, and two or three children about 
her. A little boy ran forward, then stood 
still, his frightened, surprised eyes on Nelly's 
eyes, which were fixed upon him in terror. 

" Whose is he ? — whose ? " she stammered. 

"He is Herbert Stanley, junior," the lady 
said with a smile. " I 'm Mrs. Stanley. Good 
Heaven ! what is it ? " 

Nelly had stood for a moment, her hands 
reaching out blindly, the card with its name 
and number still in them. 

u I must go," she said. " I must look for 
the real Herbert. This is another." She fell 
as the words ended, still holding the card 
tight ; and when they had revived her, only 
shook her head as questions were asked. 
The boy stood looking at her with his father's 



A WEST-END MILLINERS APPRENTICE. 89 

eyes. There could be no doubt. Nelly rose 
and looked around; then, with no word to 
tell who she might be, went out into the 
night. She crossed the street, and stood 
hesitating; and as she stood a figure came 
swiftly down the street on the other side, 
and ran up the steps of the house she 
had left. There was no doubt any more ; 
and with a long, bitter cry Nelly fled toward 
the river. There was no pause. She knew 
the way well, and if she had not, instinct 
would have led her, and did lead, through 
narrow alleys and turnings till the embank- 
ment was reached. No stop, even then. A 
policeman saw the flying figure, and a man 
who tried to hinder her heard the words, " I 
shall never be a lady now/' but that was 
all j and when he saw her face again the 
river had done its work, and the story was 
plain, though for its inner pages only the 
man who was her murderer has the key. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

LONDON SHIKT-MAKERS. 

TDLOOMSBURY has a cheerful sound, and, 
like Hop Vine Garden and Violet Lane, 
and other titles no less reassuring, seems to 
promise a breath of something better than 
the soot-laden atmosphere offered by a Lon- 
don winter. But Hop Vine Garden is but a 
passage between a line of old buildings, and 
ends in a dark court and a small and dirty 
" public," the beer-pots of which hold the 
only suggestion of hops to be discovered. 
Violet Lane is given over to cat's-meat and 
sausage makers, the combination breeding 
painful suspicions in the seeker's mind, and 
Bloomsbury has long since ceased to own 
sight or smell of any growing thing. 

But, in a gray and forlorn old group of 
houses known as Clark's Buildings, will be 
found, on certain evenings in the month, a 



LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS. 91 

little knot of women, each with open account- 
book, studying over small piles of pence and 
silver, and if their looks are any indication, 
drawing very little satisfaction from the 
operation. They are the secretaries of the 
little societies organized by the late Mrs. Pat- 
terson, who, like many ether philanthropists, 
came to see that till the workers themselves 
were roused to the consciousness of necessity 
for union, but little could be accomplished for 
them. A few of the more intelligent, stirred 
by her deep earnestness, banded together 
twelve years ago, and organized a society 
known as " The Society of Women Employed 
in Shirt, Collar, and Under-linen Making;" 
and here may be found the few who have, 
from long and sharp experience, discovered 
the chief needs of workers in these trades. 
When outward conditions as they show them- 
selves at present have been studied, when 
homes and hours and wages and all the de- 
tails of the various branches have become 
familiar, it is to this dim little hall that one 
comes for a final puzzle over all that is 
wrong. 

For it is all wrong ; nor in any corner of 



92 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD, 

working London, can any fact or figures make 
a right of the toil that is an old, old story ; 
so old that there is even impatience if one 
tells it again. Numbers are unknown, each 
one who investigates giving a different result ; 
but it is quite safe to say that five hundred 
thousand women live by the industries named 
in the society's title, not one of whom has 
ever received, or ever will receive, under the 
present system, a wage which goes beyond 
bare subsistence. Here, as in New York, or 
any other large city of the United States, the 
conditions governing the trade are much the 
same. The women, untrained and unskilled 
in every other direction, turn to these 
branches of sewing as the possibility for all, 
and scores wait for any and every chance of 
work from manufactory or small house. As 
with us, the work is chiefly put out, and 
necessarily at once arises the middle-man, or 
a gradation of middle-men, each of whom 
must have his profit, taken in every case — 
not from employer, but worker. The em- 
ployer fixes his rates without reference to 
these. He is fighting, also, for subsistence, 
plus as many luxuries as can be added from 



LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS. 93 

the profits of his superior power over condi- 
tions. He may be, and often is, to those 
nearest him, kind, unselfish, eager for right. 
But the hands are "hands," and that is all; 
and the middle-man, of whom the very same 
statement may be true, deals with the hands 
with an equal obliviousness as to their con- 
nection with bodies and souls. 

The original price per dozen of the gar- 
ments made may be the highest in the 
market, but before the woman who works is 
reached there are often five, and sometimes 
more, transfers. Where workers are em- 
ployed on the premises, they fare better, 
being paid by the piece. The minutest divi- 
sions of labor prevail, even more than with 
us — a shirt passing through many hands, 
the w r eekly wage differing for each. The 
" fitter," for instance, must be a skilled work- 
woman, the flatness and proper set of the 
shirt front depending upon correct fitting at 
the neck. For this fitting in West End 
houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, 
and can in a week fit twenty dozen — this 
meaning a pound a week. But slack seasons 
reduce the amount, so that often she earns 



94 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

but nine or ten shillings, her average for the 
year being about fourteen. For the grades 
below her the sum is proportionately less. 
The most thoroughly skilled hand in either 
shirt-making or under-linen has been known 
to make as high as twenty-eight shillings a 
week ($7.00), but this is phenomenal; nor, 
indeed, does any such possibility remain, 
prices having gone down steadily for some 
years. A pound a week for a woman, as has 
been stated elsewhere, is regarded even by 
just employers as all that can be required by 
the most exacting; and with this standard in 
mind, a fall of three or four shillings seems a 
matter of slight importance. 

Taking the various industries in which wo- 
men are emploj^ed, the needle, as usual, lead- 
ing, and the shirt-makers being a large per 
cent of the number, there are in London 
nearly a million women, self-supporting and 
self-respecting, and often the sole dependence 
of a family. This excludes the numbers of 
thriftless and otherwise helpless poor whose 
work is variable, and who, at the best, can 
earn only the lowest possible wages as un- 
skilled laborers. For the skilled ones, doing 



LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS. 95 

their best in long days of work, never less 
than twelve hours, the average earnings, after 
all chances of slack seasons and accidents 
have been taken into account, is never over 
ten shillings a week. It is worth while to 
consider what ten shillings can do. 

The allowance per head for rations for the 
old people in the Whitechapel Workhouse, 
one of the best of its class, is according to 
the authorities, three shillings eleven pence 
(96c.) per week, the quantity falling some- 
what below the amount which physiologists 
regard as necessary for an able-bodied adult. 
These supplies are purchased by contract, 
and thus a full third lower than the single 
buyer can command. But she has learned 
that appetite is not a point to be considered, 
and for the most part confines herself to 
tea and bread and butter, with a cheap 
relish now and then. Thus four shillings a 
week is made to cover food, and three shil- 
lings gives her a small back room. For such 
lights, fire, and washing as cannot be dispensed 
with, must be counted another shilling. Out 
of the remaining two shillings must come 
her twopence a week, if she belongs to any 



96 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

trades-union, leaving one shilling and ten- 
pence for clothes, holidays, amusements, sav- 
ing, and the possible doctor's bill, a sum for 
the year, at the utmost, of from four pounds 
fifteen shillings and ninepence, or a trifle 
under twenty dollars. These women are, 
every one of them, past-mistresses in the art 
of doing without ; and they do without with a 
patient courage, and often a cheerfulness, that 
is one of the most pathetic facts in their 
story. It is the established order of things. 
Why should they cry or make ado ? Yet, as 
the workshop has its own education for men, 
and gives us the order known as the " intelli- 
gent workman," so it gives us also the no less 
intelligent workwoman, possessing not only 
the natural womanly gift of many resources, 
but the added power of just so much techni- 
cal training as she may have received in her 
apprenticeship to her trade. 

Miss Simcox, who has made a study of the 
whole question, comments on this, in an ad- 
mirable article in one of the monthlies for 
1887, emphasizing the fact that these women, 
fitted by experience and long training for 
larger work, must live permanently, with ab- 



LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS. 97 

solutely no outlook or chance of change, on 
the border-land of poverty and want. They 
know all the needs, all the failings of their 
own class. Many of them give time, after 
the long day's work is done, to attempts at 
organizing and to general missionary work 
among their order; and by such efforts the 
few and feeble unions among them have been 
kept alive. But vital statistics show what the 
end is where such double labor must be per- 
formed. These women who have character 
and intelligence, and unselfish desire to work 
for others, have an average " expectation of 
life" less by twenty years than that of the 
class who know the comfortable ease of 
middle-class life. 

It is one of these workers who said not 
long ago, her words being put into the 
mouth of one of Mr. Besant's characters: 
" Ladies deliberately shut their eyes ; they 
won't take trouble ; they won't think ; they 
like things about them to look smooth and 
comfortable ; they will get things cheap if 
they can. What do they care if the cheapness is 
got ly starving women? Who is killing this 
girl here ? Bad food and hard work. Cheap- 



98 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

ness ! What do the ladies care how many 
working girls are killed ? " 

The individual woman brought face to face 
with the woman dying from overwork, would 
undoubtedly care. But the workers are out 
of sight, hidden away in attic and basement, 
or the upper rooms of great manufactories. 
The bargains are plain to see, every counter 
loaded, every window filled. And so society, 
which will have its bargains, is practically in 
a conspiracy against the worker. The woman 
who spends on her cheapest dress the utmost 
sum which her working sister has for dress, 
amusements, culture, and saving, preaches 
thrift, and it is certain the working classes 
would be better off if they had learned to 
save. Small wonder that the workers doubt 
them and their professed friendship, and that 
the breach widens day by day between classes 
and masses, bridged only by the work of 
those who, like the workers in the Women's 
Provident League, know that it is to the rich 
that the need for industry must be preached, 
not to the poor. Organization holds educa- 
tion for both, and it is now quite possible to 
know something of the methods of prominent 



LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS. 99 

firms with their workwomen, and to shun 
those which refuse to consider the questions 
of over-time, of unsanitary workrooms, of un- 
just fines and reductions, and the thousand 
ways of emptying some portion of the work- 
woman's purse into that of the employer. It 
is women who must do this, and till it is done, 
justice is mute, and the voice of our sisters' 
blood cries aloud from the ground. 






CHAPTER IX. 

THE TALE OF A BARROW. 

TF the West End knows not the East End, 
-*• save as philanthropy and Mr. Walter 
Besant have compelled it, much less does it 
know Leather Lane, a remnant of old London, 
now given over chiefly to Italians, and thus a 
little more picturesquely dirty than in its 
primal state of pure English grime. The 
eager business man hurrying down " that 
part of Holborn christened High," is as little 
aware of the neighborhood of Leather Lane 
and what it stands for, as the New Yorker on 
Broadway is of Mulberry Street and the 
Great Bend. For either or both, entrance is 
entrance into a world quite unknown to dec- 
orous respectability, and, if one looks aright, 
as full of wonders and discoveries as other 
unknown countries under our feet. Out of 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. 101 

Leather Lane, with its ancient houses swarm- 
ing with inhabitants and in all stages of 
decay and foulness, open other lanes as un- 
savory, through which the costers drive their 
barrows, chaffering with dishevelled women, 
who bear a black eye or other token that the 
British husband has been exercising his 
rights, and who find bargaining for a bunch 
of turnips or a head of cabbage an exhilarat- 
ing change. 

There were many costers and many bar- 
rows, but among them all hardly one so pop- 
ular as " old Widgeon," who had been in the 
business forty years ; and as he had chosen to 
remain a bachelor, an absolutely unheard-of 
state of things, he was an object of deepest 
interest to every woman in Leather Lane and 
its purlieus. It was always possible that he 
might change his mind ; and from the oldest 
inhabitant down to the child just beginning 
to ask questions, there was always a sense of 
expectation where Widgeon was concerned. 
He, in the meantime, did his day's work con- 
tentedly, had a quick eye for all trouble, and 
in such cases was sure to give overweight, 
or even to let the heavy penny or two fall 



102 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

accidentally into the purchase. His donkey 
had something the same expression of pa- 
tient good-humored receptivity. The chil- 
dren climbed over the barrow and even on 
the donkey's back, and though Widgeon 
made great feint of driving them off with a 
very stubby whip, they knew well that it 
would always just miss them, and returned 
day after day undismayed. He " did for 
himself" in a garret in a dark little house, up 
a darker court; and here it was popularly 
supposed he had hidden the gains of all 
these forty years. They might be there or 
in the donkey's stable, but they were some- 
where, and then came the question, who 
would have them when he died ? 

To these speculations Nan listened silently, 
in the pauses of the machines on which her 
mother and three other women stitched trou- 
sers. Nothing was expected of her but to 
mind the baby, to see that the fire kept in, 
just smouldering, and that there was always 
hot water enough for the tea. On the days 
when they all stitched she fared well enough ; 
but when she had carried home the work, and 
received the money, there was a day, some- 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. 103 

times two or three, in which gin ruled, and 
the women first shouted and sang songs, and 
at last lay about the floor in every stage of 
drunkenness. Gradually chances for work 
slipped away; the machines were given up, 
and the partnership of workers dissolved, and 
at twelve, Nan and the baby were beggars 
and the mother in prison for aggravated as- 
sault on a neighbor. She died there, and 
thus settled one problem, and now came the 
other, how was Nan to live ? 

Old Widgeon answered this question. 
They had always been good friends from the 
day he had seen her standing, holding the 
baby, crippled and hopelessly deformed from 
its birth. His barrow was almost empty, and 
the donkey pointing his long ears toward the 
stable. 

" Get in," he said, " an' I '11 give you a bit 
of a ride," and Nan, speechless with joy, 
climbed in and was driven to the stable, and 
once there, watched the unharnessing and 
received some stray oranges as she finally 
turned away. From that day old Widgeon 
became her patron saint. She had shot up 
into a tall girl, shrinking from those about 



104 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

her, and absorbed chiefly in the crooked little 
figure, still "the baby ; " but tall as she might 
be, she was barely twelve, and how should 
she hire a machine and pay room rent and 
live? 

Widgeon settled all that. 

" You know how to stitch away at them 
trousers ? " he had said, and Nan nodded. 

" Then I '11 see you through the first week 
or two," he said ; " but, mind ! don't you 
whisper it, or I '11 'ave hevery distressed 
female in the court down on me, and there's 
enough hof 'em now." 

Nan nodded again, but he saw the tears in 
her eyes, and regarded words as quite un- 
necessary. The sweater asked no questions 
when she came for a bundle of work, nor 
did she tell him that she alone was now re- 
sponsible. She had learned to stitch. Skill 
came with practice, and she might as well 
have such slight advantage as arose from be- 
ing her mother's messenger. 

So Nan's independent life began, and so it 
went on. She grew no taller, but did grow 
older, her silent gravity making her seem 
older still. It was hard work. She had 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. 105 

never liked tea, and she loathed the sight and 
smell of either beer or spirits, old experience 
having made them hateful. Thus she had 
none of the nervous stimulant which keeps 
up the ordinary worker, and with small know- 
ledge of any cookery but boiling potatoes 
and turnips, and frying bacon or sprats, fared 
worse than her companions. But she had 
learned to live on very little. She stitched 
steadily all day and every day, gaining more 
and more skill, but never able to earn more 
than fourteen shillings a week. Prices went 
down steadily. At fourteen shillings she 
could live, and had managed even not only to 
pay Widgeon but to pick up some "bits of 
things." She was like her father, the old 
people in the alley said. He had been a 
silent, decent, hard-working man, who died 
broken-hearted at the turn his wife took for 
drink. Nan had his patience and his faithful- 
ness ; and Johnny, who crawled about the 
room, and could light a fire and do some odds 
and ends of house-keeping, was like her, and 
saved her much time as he grew older, but 
hardly any bigger. He had even learned to 
fry sprats, and to sing, in a high, cracked, 



106 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

little voice, a song known throughout the 
alley : — 

" Ob, ? t is my delight of a Friday night, 

When sprats they is n't dear, 
To fry a couple o' dozen or so 
Upon a fire clear." 

There are many verses of this ditty, all end- 
ing with the chorus : — 

" Oh, 'tis my delight of a Friday night! " 

and Johnny varied the facts ingeniously, and 
shouted " bacon/' or anything else that would 
fry, well pleased at his own ingenuity. 

"He was 'wanting.' Nan might better 
put him away in some asylum/' the neigh- 
bors said ; but Nan paid no attention. He 
was all she had, and he was much better 
worth working for than herself, and so she 
went on. 

Old Widgeon had been spending the even- 
ing with them. Nan had stitched on as she 
must; for prices had gone down again, and 
she was earning but nine shillings a week. 
Widgeon seldom said much. He held Johnny 
on his knee, and now and then looked at Nan. 

" It 's a dog's life," he said at last. " It 's 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. 107 

far worse than a dog's. You'd be better off 
going with a barrow, Nan. I 'm a good mind 
to leave you mine, Nan. You 'd get a bit of 
air, then, and you'd make — well, a good bit 
more than you do now." 

Widgeon had checked himself suddenly. 
Nobody knew what the weekly gain might 
be, but people put it as high as three pounds ; 
and this was fabulous wealth. 

"I've thought of it," Nan said. « I 've 
thought of it ever since that day you rode 
me and Johnny in the barrow. Do you 
mind ? The donkey knows me now, I think. 
He 's a wise one." 

" Ay, he 's a wise one," the old man said. 
" Donkeys is wiser than folks think." He 
put Johnny down suddenly, and sat looking at 
him strangely; but Nan did not see. The 
machine whirred on, but it stopped suddenly 
as Johnny cried out. Widgeon had slipped 
silently from his chair ; his eyes were open, 
but he did not seem to see her, and he was 
breathing heavily. Nan ran into the passage 
and called an old neighbor, and the two to- 
gether, using all their strength, managed to 
get him to the bed. 



108 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

" It 's a stroke/' the woman said. " Lord 
love you, what '11 you do ? He can't stay 
here. He 'd better be sent to 'ospital." 

" I '11 be 'anged first/' said old Widgeon, 
who had opened his eyes suddenly and 
looked at them both. " I was a bit queer, 
but I'm right enough now. Who talks about 
'ospitals ? " 

He tried to move and his face changed. 

" I 'm a bit queer yet," he said, " but it '11 
pass; it'll pass. JS T an, you'll not mind my 
being in your way for a night. There 's 
money in me pocket. Maybe there's an- 
other room to be 'ad.' ? 

" There 's a bit of a one off me own that 
was me John's, an' him only gone yesterday," 
said the woman eagerly ; " an' a bed an' all, 
an' openin' right off of this. The door 's be- 
hind that press. It 's one with this, an' the 
two belongs together, an' for two an' six a 
week without, an' three an' six with all that 's 
in it, it 's for anybody that wants it." 

u I '11 take it a week," said old Widgeon, 
" but I '11 not want the use of it more than 
this night. I 'm a bit queer now, but it '11 
pass; it'll pass." 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. 109 

The week went, but old Widgeon was still 
"a bit queer;" and the doctor, who was at 
last "called in, said that he was likely to re- 
main so. One side was paralyzed. It might 
lessen, but would never recover entirely. He 
would have to be looked out for. This was 
his daughter ? She must understand that he 
needed care, and would not be able to work 
any more. 

Old Widgeon heard him in silence, and 
then turned his face to the wall, and for 
hours made no sign. When he spoke at last, 
it was in his usual tone. 

" I thought to end my days in the free 
air," he said, " but that ain't to be. And 
I 'm thinking the stroke 's come to do you a 
good turn, Nan. There 's the donkey and the 
barrow, and everybody knowing it as well as 
they know me. I '11 send you to my man in 
Covent Garden. He 's a fair 'un. He don't 
cheat. He'll do well by you, an' you shall 
drive the barrow and see what you make of 
it. We'll be partners, Nan. You look out 
for me a bit, an' I '11 teach you the business 
and 'ave an heye to Johnny. What do you 
say ? Will you try it ? It '11 break me 'art if 



110 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

that donkey and barrow goes to hanybody 
that'll make light of 'em hand habuse 'em. 
There hain't such another donkey and barrow 
in all London,, and you 're one that knows it, 
Nan." 

" Yes, I know it," Nan said. "You ought 
to know, if you think I could do it." 

" There 's nought that can't be done if you 
sets your mind well to it," said old Widgeon. 
" And now, Nan, 'ere 's the key, and you get 
Billy just by the stable there to move my bits 
o' things over here. That court 's no place for 
you, an' there 's more light here. Billy 's a 
good 'un. He '11 'elp you when you need it." 

This is the story of the fresh-faced, serious 
young woman who drives a donkey-barrow 
through certain quiet streets in northwest 
London, and has a regular line of customers, 
who find her wares, straight from Covent 
Garden, exactly what she represents. Health 
and strength have come with the new work, 
and though it has its hardships, they are as 
nothing compared with the deadly, monoton- 
ous labor at "the machine. Johnny, too, 
shares the benefit, and holds the reins or 
makes change, at least once or twice a week, 



THE TALE OF A BARROW. Ill 

while old Widgeon, a little more helpless, but 
otherwise the same, regards his "stroke" as 
a providential interposition on Nan's behalf, 
and Nan herself as better than any daughter. 
" I 've all the good of a child, and none o' 
the hups hand downs o' the married state," 
he chuckles ; " hand so, whathever you think, 
I 'm lucky to the hend." 



CHAPTER X. 

STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 

"T17TTH hall the click there is to a 
woman's tongue you'd think she 
could ' patter ' with the best of the men, but, 
Lor' bless you ! a woman can't c patter ' any 
more 'n she can make a coat, or sweep a 
chimley. And why she can't beats me, and 
neither I nor nobody knows." 

"To patter" is a verb conjugated daily by 
the street seller of any pretensions. The 
coster needs less of it than most vendors, his 
wares speaking for themselves ; but the gen- 
eral seller of small-wares, bootlaces, toys, 
children's books, and what not, must have a 
natural gift, or acquire it as fast as possible. 
To patter is to rattle off with incredible 
swiftness and fluency, not only recommenda- 
tions of the goods themselves, but any side 
thoughts that occur ; and often a street-seller 



STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 113 

is practically a humorous lecturer, a student of 
men and morals, and gives the result in shrewd 
sentences well worth listening to. Half 
a dozen derivations are assigned to the word, 
one being that it comes from the rattled 
off paternosters of the devout but hasty 
Catholic, who says as many as possible in a 
given space of time. Be this as it may, it 
is quite true that pattering is an essential 
feature of any specially successful street-call- 
ing, and equally true that no woman has yet 
appeared who possesses the gift. 

In spite of this nearly fatal deficiency, in- 
numerable women pursue street trades, and, 
notwithstanding exposure and privation and 
the scantiest of earnings, have every ad- 
vantage over their sisters of the needle. 
Eheumatism, born of bad diet and the pene- 
trating rawness and fogs of eight months of 
the English year, is their chief enemy ; but as 
a whole they are a strong, hardy, and healthy 
set of workers, who shudder at the thought of 
bending all day over machine or needle, and 
thank the fate that first turned them toward 
a street-calling. So conservative, however, 
is working England, that the needlewoman, 

8 



114 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

even at starvation point, feels herself superior 
to a street-seller ; and the latter is quite con- 
scious of this feeling, and resents it accord- 
ingly. With many the adoption of such 
employment is the result of accident, and the 
women in it divide naturally into four classes : 
(1) The wives of street-sellers; (2) Mechan- 
ics, or laborers' wives who go out street- 
selling while their husbands are at work, in 
order to swell the family income; (3) The 
widows of former street-sellers ; (4) Single 
women. 

Trades that necessitate pushing a heavy 
barrow, and, indeed, most of those involv- 
ing the carrying of heavy weights, are in 
the hands of men, and also the more skilled 
trades, such as the selling of books or station- 
ery, — in short, the business in which patter 
is demanded. Occasionally there is a partner- 
ship, and man and wife carry on the same 
trade, she aiding him with his barrow, but for 
the most part they choose different occupa- 
tions. In the case of one man in White- 
chapel who worked for a sweater; the wife 
sold water-cresses morning and evening^ while 
the wife of a bobbin turner had taken to 



STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 115 

small-wares, shoe-laces, etc. as a help. Both 
tailor and turner declared that, if things went 
on as they were at present, they should take to 
the streets also ; for earnings were less and less, 
and they were " treated like dirt, and worse." 
The women whose trades have been noted 
are dealers in fish, shrimps, and winkles, and 
sometimes oysters, fruit, and vegetables, — 
fruit predominating, orange-women and girls 
being as much a feature of London street 
life as in the days of pretty Nelly Gwynne. 
Sheep-trotters, too, are given over to women, 
with rice-milk, which is a favorite street- 
dainty, requiring a good deal of preparation ; 
they sell curds and whey, and now and then, 
though very seldom, they have a coffee or 
elder-wine stand, the latter being sold hot 
and spiced, as a preventive of rheumatism 
and chill. To these sales they add fire- 
screens and ornaments (the English grate 
in summer being filled with every order of 
paper ornamentation), laces, millinery, cut 
flowers, boot and corset laces, and small-wares 
of every description, including wash-leathers, 
dressed and undressed dolls, and every variety 
of knitted articles, mittens, cuffs, socks, etc. 



116 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

It will be seen that the range in street 
trades is far wider for the English than for 
the American woman, to whom it would al- 
most never occur as a possible means of liveli- 
hood. But London holds several thousands 
of these women, a large proportion Irish, it is 
true, with a mixture of other nationalities, 
but English still predominating. The Irish- 
woman is more fluent, and can even patter 
in slight degree, but has less intelligence, and 
confines herself to the lower order of trades. 
For both Irish and English there is the same 
deep-seated horror of the workhouse. All 
winter a young Irishwoman has sat at the 
corner of a little street opening from the Com- 
mercial Road, a basket of apples at her side, 
and her thin garments no protection against 
the fearful chill of fog and mist. She had 
come to London, hoping to find a brother and 
go over with him to America; but no trace of 
him could be discovered, and so she borrowed 
a shilling and became an apple-seller. 

" God knows," she said, " I 'd be betther off 
in the house [workhouse], for it 's half dead I 
am entirely ; but I 'd rather live on twopence 
a day than come to that." 



STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 117 

Practically she was living on very little 
more. An aunt, also a street-seller, had 
taken her in. She rented a small room near 
by, for which they paid two shillings a week, 
their whole expenses averaging sixpence each 
a day. Naturally they were half starved ; 
but they preferred this to " the house," and 
no one who has examined these retreats can 
blame them. 

It is the poor who chiefly patronize , these 
street-sellers, and they swarm where the poor 
are massed. The " Borough," on the Surrey 
side of the river, with its innumerable little 
streets and lanes, each more wretched than 
the last, has hundreds of them, no less than 
the better-known East End. Leather Lane, 
one of the most crowded and distinctive of the 
quarters of the poor, though comparatively 
little known, has also its network of alleys 
and courts opening from it, and is one of the 
most crowded markets in the city, rivalling 
even Petticoat Lane. The latter, whose time- 
honored name has foolishly been changed to 
Middlesex Street, is an old-clothes market, 
and presents one of the most extraordinary 
sights in London ; but the trade is chiefly in 



118 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

the hands of men, though their wives usually 
act as assistants and determine the quality of 
a garment till the masculine sense has been 
educated up to the proper point. Any very 
small, very old, and very dirty street at any 
point has its proportion of street-sellers, whose 
dark, grimy, comfortless rooms are their refuge 
at night. Other rooms of a better order are 
occupied, it may be, by some relative or child 
to be supported ; and higher still rank those 
that are counted homes, where husband and 
wife meet when the day's work is done. 

Like the needlewomen, the diet of the 
majority is meagre and poor to a degree. 
The Irishwoman is much more ready to try 
to make the meal hot and relishable than 
the Englishwoman, though even she confines 
herself to cheap fish and potatoes, herring or 
plaice at two a penny. 

A quiet, very respectable looking woman, 
the widow of a coster, sold cakes of blacking 
and small-wares, and gave her view of this 
phase of the question. 

" It 's cheaper, their way of doing. Oh, 
yes, but not so livening. I could live cheaper 
on fish and potatoes than tea and bread and 



STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 119 

butter; but that ain't it. They're more 
trouble, an' when you 've been on your legs 
all day, an' get to your bit of a home for a 
cup of tea, you want a bit of rest, and you 
can't be cooking and fussing with fish. 
There 's always a neighbor to give you a jug 
of boiling water, if you 've no time for fire, or 
it's summer, and tea livens you up a bit 
where a herring won't. I take mine without 
milk, and like it better without, and often I 
don't have butter on me bread. But I get 
along, and, please God, 1 11 be able to keep 
out of the ' house ' to the end." 

The married women fare better. The men 
decline to be put off with bread and tea, and 
the cook-shops and cheap markets help them 
to what they call good living. They buy 
" good block ornaments," that is, small pieces 
of meat, discolored but not dirty nor tainted, 
which are set out for sale on the butcher's 
block. Tripe and cowheel are regarded as 
dainties, and there is the whole range of 
mysterious English preparations of question- 
able meat, from sausage and polonies to save- 
loys and cheap pies. Soup can be had, pea 
or eel, at two or three pence a pint, and beer, 



120 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

an essential to most of them, is " threepence 
a pot [quart] in your own jugs/' A savory 
dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, 
and the English worker fares better in this 
respect than the American, for whom there is 
much less provision in the way of cheap food 
and cook-shops. In fact the last are almost 
unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no 
means taking their place. Even with bread 
and tea alone, there is a good deal more 
nourishment, since English bread is never 
allowed to rise to the over-lightness which 
appears an essential to the American buyer. 
The law with English breads and cakes of 
whatever nature appears to be to work in all 
the flour the dough can hold, and pudding 
must be a slab, and bread compact and dense 
to satisfy the English palate. Dripping is 
the substitute for butter, and the children eat 
the slice of bread and dripping contentedly. 
Fat of any sort is in demand, the piercing 
rawness of an English winter seeming to call 
for heating food no less than that of the 
Esquimaux for its rations of blubber and 
tallow. But the majority of the women leave 
dripping for the children, and if a scrap of 



STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN. 121 

butter cannot be had, rest contented with 
bread and tea, and an occasional pint of beer. 
For working women as a class, however, there is 
much less indulgence in this than is supposed. 
To the men it is as essential as the daily 
meals, and the women regard it in the same 
way. " We do well enough with our tea, but 
a man must have his pint," they say ; and this 
principle is applied to the children, the girls 
standing by while the boys take their turn at 
the "pot of mild." 

This for the best order of workers. Below 
this line are all grades of indulgence ending 
with the woman who earns just enough for 
the measure of gin that will give her a day or 
an hour of unconsciousness and freedom from 
any human claim. But the pressure of num- 
bers and of competing workers compels sober- 
ness, the steadiest and most capable being 
barely able to secure subsistence, while below 
them is every conceivable phase of want and 
struggle, more sharply defined and with less 
possibility of remedy than anything found in 
the approximate conditions on American soil. 



CHAPTER XL 



LONDON SHOP-GIRLS. 



" T T 'S the ladies that 's in the way, mum. 
Once get a lady to think that a girl 
is n't idling because she 's sitting down, and the 
battle 's won. But a lady comes into a shop 
blacker 'n midnight if every soul in it is n't on 
their feet and springing to serve her. I ? ve 
got seats, but, bless you! my trade 'd be 
ruined if the girls used them much. 'T is n't 
that I 'm not willing, and me brother as well. 
It 's the customers, the lady customers, that 
would n't stand it. Its them that you 've got 
to talk to." 

Once more it is a woman who is apparently 
woman's worst enemy, and London sins far 
more heavily in this respect than New York, 
and for a very obvious reason, that of sharply 
defined lines of caste, and the necessity of em- 
phasizing them felt by all whose position does 



LONDON SHOP-GIRLS. 123 

not speak for itself. A " born lady " on enter- 
ing a shop where women clerks were sitting, 
might realize that from eleven to fourteen 
hours' service daily might well be punctu- 
ated by a few moments on the bits of board 
pushed in between boxes, w r hich do duty for 
seats, and be glad that an opportunity had 
been improved. Not so the wife of the pros- 
perous butcher or baker or candlestick maker, 
rejoicing, it may be, in the first appearance 
in plush and silk, and bent upon making it as 
impressive as possible. To her, obsequious- 
ness is the first essential of any dealing with 
the order from which she is emerging ; and 
her custom will go to the shop where its out- 
ward tokens are most profuse. A clerk found 
sitting is simply embodied impertinence, and 
the floor manager who allows it an offender 
against every law of propriety; and thus it 
happens that seats are slipped out of sight, 
and exhausted women smile and ask, as 
the purchase is made, "And what is the 
next pleasure?" in a tone that makes the 
American hearer cringe for the abject humil- 
ity that is the first condition of success as 
seller. 



124 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

Even the best shops are not exempt from 
this, and as one passes from west to east the 
ratio increases, culminating in the oily glib- 
ness of the bargain-loving Jew, and his no 
less bargain-loving London brother of White- 
chapel, or any other district unknown to 
fashion. 

This, however, is a merely outward phase. 
The actual wrongs of the system lie deeper, 
but are soon as apparent. For the shop-girl, 
as for the needlewoman or general worker of 
any description whatsoever, over-time is the 
standing difficulty, and a grievance almost 
impossible to redress. That an act of parlia- 
ment forbids the employment of any young 
person under eighteen more than eleven 
hours a day, makes small difference. Inspec- 
tors cannot be everywhere at once, and viola- 
tions are the rule. In fact, the law is a dead 
letter, and the employer who finds himself 
suddenly arraigned for violation is as indig- 
nant as if no responsibility rested upon him. 
A committee has for many months been doing 
self-elected work in this direction, registering 
the names of shops where over-hours are de- 
manded, informing the clerks of the law and 



LONDON SHOP-GIRLS. 125 

its bearings, and urging them to make formal 
complaint. The same difficulty confronts them 
here as in the attempts to reduce over-time 
for tailoresses and general needlewomen — 
the fear of the workers themselves that any 
complaint will involve the losing of the situ- 
ation ; and thus silent submission is the rule 
for all, any revolt bringing upon them instant 
discharge. 

In a prolonged inquiry into the condition 
of shop-girls in both the West and East End, 
the needs to be met first of all summed them- 
selves up in four : (1) more seats and far 
more liberty in the use of them; (2) bet- 
ter arrangements for midday dinner — on the 
premises if possible, the girls now losing 
much of the hour in a hurried rush to the 
nearest eatinghouse ; (3) with this, some reg- 
ularity as to time for dinner, this being left 
at present to the caprice of the manager, who 
both delays and shortens time; (4) much 
greater care in the selection of managers. A 
fifth point might well be added, that of a free 
afternoon each week. This has been given 
by a few London firms, and has worked well 
in the added efficiency and interest of the 



126 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

girls, but by the majority, is regarded as a 
wild and very useless innovation. 

The first point is often considered as set- 
tled, yet for both sides of the sea is actually 
in much the same case. Seats are kept out 
of sight, and for the majority of both sellers 
and buyers, there is the smallest comprehen- 
sion of the strain of continuous standing, or 
its final effect. It is the popular conviction 
that women "get used to it," and to a certain 
extent this is true, the strong and robust ad- 
justing themselves to the conditions required. 
But the majority must spend the larger por- 
tion of the week's earnings on the neat 
clothing required by the position, and to ac- 
complish this they go underfed to a degree 
that is half starvation. It is this latter divi- 
sion of shop girls who suffer, not only from 
varicose veins brought on by long standing, 
but from many other diseases, the result of 
the same cause ; yet, till women, who come 
as purchasers to the shops where women are 
employed, realize and remember this, reform 
under this head is practically impossible. 
The employer knows that, even if a few 
protest against the custom, his trade would 



LONDON SHOP-GIRLS. 127 

suffer were it done away with ; and thus buyer 
and seller form a combination against which 
revolt is impossible. 

The inquiry brought one fact to light, 
which, so far as I know, has as yet no counter- 
part in the United States, and this is, that in 
certain West End shops every girl must con- 
form to a uniform size of waist, this varying 
from eighteen to twenty inches, but never 
above twenty. Tall or short, fat or lean, Na- 
ture must stand aside, and the hour-glass 
serve as model, the results simply adding one 
more factor of destruction to the number 
already ranged against the girl. 

The matter of regular meals has also far 
less attention than is necessary. Dinner is a 
" movable feast." The girls are allowed to go 
out only two or three at once, and often it is 
three o'clock or even later before some have 
broken the fast. Though there is often ample 
room for tea and coffee urns, the suggestion 
seems to be regarded as a dangerous innova- 
tion, holding under the innocent seeming, a 
possible social revolution. The thing that 
hath been shall be, and the obstinate hide- 
bound conservatism of the English shop- 



128 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD: 

keeper is beyond belief till experience has 
made it certain. A few employers consider 
this matter. The majority ignore it as be- 
neath consideration. 

The question of suitable floor managers is 
really the comprehensive one, including al- 
most every evil and every good that can 
come to the shop girl, whether in the East or 
West End. Here, as with us, the girl is abso- 
lutely in his power. He governs the whole 
system of fines, one uncomfortable but neces- 
sary feature of any large establishment, and 
injustice in these can have fullest possible 
play. 

" The fines are an awful nuisance, that they 
are," said a bright-faced girl in one of the 
best-known shops of London — a great bazar, 
much like Macy's. " But then it all depends 
on the manager. Some of them are real 
nasty, you know, and if they happen not to 
like a girl, they stick on fines just to spite her. 
You see we 're in their power, and some of 
them just love to show it and bully the girls 
no end. And worse than that, they 're impu- 
dent too if a girl is pretty, and often she 
does n't dare complain, for fear of losing the 



LONDON SHOP-GIRLS. 129 

place, and he has it all his own way. This 
department 's got a very fair manager, and we 
all like him. He's careful about fines, and 
plans about our dinners and all that, so 
we 're better off than most. The manager 
does what he pleases everywhere." 

These facts are for the West End, where 
dealings are nominally fair, and where wages 
may, in some exceptional case, run as high as 
eighteen shillings or even a pound a week. 
But the average falls far below this, from ten 
to fourteen being the usual figures, while seven 
and eight may be the sum. This, for the girl 
who lives at home, represents dress and pocket- 
money, but the great majority must support 
themselves entirely. We have already seen 
what this sum can do for the shirt-maker and 
general needlewoman, and it is easy to judge 
how the girl fares for whom the weekly 
wage is less. In the East End it falls some- 
times as low as three shillings and sixpence 
(84c). The girls club together, huddling 
in small back rooms, and spending all that 
can be saved on dress. Naturally, unless with 
exceptionally keen consciences, they find what 
is called " sin " an easier fact than starvation ; 

9 



130 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

and so the story goes on, and out of greed is 
born the misery, which, at last, compels greed 
to heavier poor rates, and thus an approxima- 
tion to the distribution of the profit which 
should have been the worker's. 

Here, as in all cities, the place seems to 
beckon every girl ambitious of something 
beyond domestic service. There are cheap 
amusements, " penny-gaffs " and the like, the 
" penny-gaff " being the equivalent of our 
dime museum. There is the companionship 
of the fellow-worker; the late going home 
through brightly-lighted streets, and the 
crowding throng of people, — all that makes 
the alleviation of the East End life ; and there 
is, too, the chance, always possible, of a lover 
and a husband, perhaps a grade above, or 
many grades above, their beginning or their 
present lives. This alone is impulse and hope. 
It is much the same story for both sides of the 
sea ; and here, as in most cases where woman's 
work is involved, it is with women that any 
change lies, and from their efforts that some- 
thing better must come. 



CHAPTER XII. 

PROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE EEL-SOUP 
MAN IN THE BOROUGH. 

TVJOW and then, in the long search into 
^ ^ the underlying causes of effects which 
are plain to all men's eyes, one pauses till 
the rush of impressions has ceased, and it is 
possible again to ignore this many-sided, de- 
manding London, which makes a claim un- 
known to any other city of the earth save 
Rome. But there is a certain justification in 
lingering at points where women and chil- 
dren congregate, since their life also is part of 
the quest, and nowhere can it better be seen 
than in and about Covent Garden Market, — 
a thousand thoughts arising as the old square 
is entered from whatever point. 

It is not alone the first days of the pil- 
grim's wanderings in London that are filled 
with the curious sense of home coming that 



132 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

makes up the consciousness of many an 
American. It is as if an old story were told 
again, and the heir, stolen in childhood, re- 
turned, unrecognized by those about him, 
but recalling with more and more freshness 
and certainty the scenes of which he was 
once a part. The years slip away. Two 
hundred and more of them lie between, it is 
true ; but not two hundred nor ten times two 
hundred can blot out the lines of a record in 
which the struggle and the hope of all Eng- 
lish-speaking people was one. For past or 
present alike, London stands as the fountain- 
head ; and thus, whatever pain may come 
from the oppressive sense of crowded, swarm- 
ing life pent up in these dull gray walls, 
whatever conviction that such a monster mass 
of human energy and human pain needs dif- 
fusion and not concentration, London holds 
and will hold a fascination that is quite apart 
from any outward aspect. 

To go to a point determined upon before- 
hand is good. To lose oneself in the laby- 
rinth of lanes and alleys and come suddenly 
upon something quite as desirable, is even 
better ; and this losing is as inevitable as the 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 133 

finding also becomes. The first perplexity 
arises from the fact that a London street is 
" everything by turns and nothing long/' 
and that a solitary block of buildings owns 
often a name as long as itself. The line of 
street which, on the map, appears continu- 
ous, gives a dozen changes to the mile, and 
the pilgrim discovers quickly that he is always 
somewhere else than at or on the point de- 
termined upon. Then the temptation to add 
to this complication by sudden excursions 
into shadowy courts and dark little passages 
is irresistible, not to mention the desire, 
equally pressing, of discovering at once if 
Violet Lane and Hop Vine Alley and Myrtle 
Court have really any relation to their names, 
or are simply the reaching out of their in- 
habitants for some touch of Nature's bene- 
factions. Violet Lane may have had its 
hedgerows and violets in a day long dead, 
precisely as hop vines may have flung their 
pale green bells over cottage paling, for both 
are far outside the old city limits ; but to-day 
they are simply the narrowest of passages 
between the grimiest of buildings, given over 
to trade in its most sordid form, with never 



134 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

a green leaf even to recall the country hedge- 
rows long since only memory. 

It is a matter of no surprise, then, to find 
that Covent Garden holds no hint of its past 
save in name, though from the noisy Strand 
one has passed into so many sheltered, quiet 
nooks unknown to nine tenths of the hurry- 
ing throng in that great artery of London, 
that one half expects to see the green trees 
and the box-bordered alleys of the old garden 
where the monks once walked. Far back in 
the very beginning of the thirteenth century 
it was the convent garden of Westminster, 
and its choice fruits and flowers rejoiced the 
soul of the growers, who planted and pruned 
with small thought of what the centuries 
were to bring. Through all chances and 
changes it remained a garden up to 1621, 
when much of the original ground had been 
swallowed up by royal grants, and one duke 
and another had built his town-house amid 
the spreading trees; for this " amorous and 
herbivorous parish," as Sidney Smith calls it, 
was one of the inost fashionable quarters of 
London. The Stuart kings and their courts 
delighted in it, and the square was filled 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 135 

with houses designed by Inigo Jones, the 
north and east side of the market having an 
arcade called the " Portico Walk/' but soon 
changed to the name which it has long borne, 
— the " Piazza." The market went on be- 
hind these pillars, but year by year, as Lon- 
don grew, pushed itself toward the centre of 
the square, till now not a foot of vacant space 
remains. At one of its stalls may still be 
found an ancient marketman, whose name, 
Anthony Piazza, is a memory of a parish cus- 
tom which named after this favorite walk 
many of the foundling children born in the 
parish. 

There is nothing more curious in all Lon- 
don than the transformations known to this 
once quiet spot. Drury Lane is close at 
hand, and Covent Garden Theatre is as well 
known as the market itself. The convent 
has become a play-house. " Monks and nuns 
turn actors and actresses. The garden, for- 
mal and quiet, where a salad was cut for a 
lady abbess, and flowers were gathered to 
adorn images, becomes a market, noisy and 
full of life, distributing its thousands of fruits 
and flowers to a vicious metropolis." Two 



136 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

quaint old inns are still here; two great 
national theatres, and a churchyard full of 
mouldy but still famous celebrities, — the 
church itself, bare and big, rising above them. 
In the days of the Stuarts, people prayed to 
be buried here hardly less than in West- 
minster Abbey, and the lover of epitaph and 
monument will find occupation for many 
an hour. This strange, squat old building, 
under the shadow of the church, is the mar- 
ket, its hundred columns and chapel-looking 
fronts always knee-deep and more in baskets 
and fruits and vegetables, while its air still 
seems to breathe of old books, old painters, 
and old authors. 

" Night and morning are at meeting/' for 
Covent Garden makes small distinction be- 
tween the two, and whether it is a late supper 
or an early breakfast that the coffee-rooms 
and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be de- 
termined by one who has elected to know 
how the market receives and how it distri- 
butes its supplies. In November fog and 
mist, or the blackness of early winter, with 
snow on the ground, or cold rain falling, 
resolution is needed for such an expedition, 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 137 

and still more, if one would see all that the 
deep night hides, and that comes to light as 
the dawn struggles through. This business of 
feeding a city of four million people seems 
the simplest and most natural of occupations ; 
but the facts involved are staggering, not 
alone in the mere matter of quantities and 
the amazement at the first sight of them, but 
in the thousands of lives tangled with them. 
Quantity is the first impression. Every cel- 
lar runs over with green stuff, mountains of 
which come in on enormous wagons and fill 
up all spaces left vacant, heaving masses of 
basket stumbling from other wagons and fill- 
ing with instant celerity. In the great vans 
pour, from every market garden and outlying 
district of London, from all England, from 
the United Kingdom, from all the world, lit- 
erally; for it is soon discovered that these 
enormous vehicles on high springs and with 
immense wheels, drawn by Normandy horses 
of size and strength to match, are chiefly from 
the railway stations, and that the drivers, 
who seem to be built on the same plan as 
the horses and vans, have big limbs and big 
voices and a high color, and that the bulg- 



138 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

ing pockets of their velveteen suits show in- 
voices and receipt books. 

Not alone from railway stations and trains, 
from which tons of cabbages, carrots, onions, 
and all the vegetable tribe issue, but from 
the docks where steamers from Rotterdam 
and Antwerp and India and America, and 
all that lie between, come the contributions, 
ranged presently in due order in stall and ar- 
cade. There is no hint of anything grosser 
than the great cabbages, which appear 
to be London's favorite vegetable. Meat 
has its place at Smithfield, and fish at Bil- 
lingsgate, but the old garden is, in one sense, 
true to its name, and gives us only the kindly 
fruits of the earth, with their transformations 
into butter and cheese. 

In the central arcade fruit has the honors, 
and no prettier picture can well be imagined. 
For once under these gray skies there is a 
sense of color and light, and there is no sur- 
prise in hearing that Turner came here to 
study both, and that even the artist of to-day 
does not disdaih the same method. 

It is the flower-market, however, to which 
one turns with a certainty gained at once that 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 139 

no disappointment follows intimate acquain- 
tance with English flowers. There are exotics 
for those who will, but it is not with them 
that one lingers. It is to the hundreds upon 
hundreds of flower-pots, in which grow roses 
and geraniums and mignonette and a score 
with old-fashioned but forever beloved names. 
There are great bunches of mignonette for a 
penny, and lesser bunches of sweet odors for 
the same coin, while the violets have rows of 
baskets to themselves, as indeed they need, 
for scores of buyers flock about them, — little 
buyers chiefly, with tangled hair and bare 
feet and the purchase-money tied in some 
corner of their rags; for they buy to sell 
again, and having tramped miles it may be 
to this fountain-head, will tramp other miles 
before night comes, making their way into 
court and alley and under sunless doorways, 
crying " Violets ! sweet violets ! " as they 
were cried in Herrick's time. A ha'penny 
will buy one of the tiny bunches which they 
have made up with swift fingers, and they are 
bought even by the poorest; how, heaven 
only knows. But, in cracked jug or battered 
tin, the bunch of violets sweetens the foul 



140 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

air, or the bit of mignonette grows and even 
thrives, where human kind cannot. 

So, though Covent Garden has in winter 
" flowers at guineas apiece, pineapples at guin- 
eas a pound, and peas at guineas a quart," 
— these for the rich only, — it has also 
its possibilities for the poor. They throng 
about it at all times, for there is always a 
chance of some stray orange or apple or re- 
jected vegetable that will help out a meal. 
They throng above all in these terrible days 
when the " unemployed " are huddling under 
arches and in dark places where they lay 
their homeless heads, and where, in the hours 
between night and morning, the cocoa-rooms 
open for the hungry drivers of the big vans, 
who pour down great mugs of coffee and 
cocoa, and make away with mountains of 
bread and butter. A penny gives a small 
mug of cocoa and a slice of bread and butter, 
and the owner of a penny is rich. Often it 
is shared, and the sharer, half drunk still, it 
may be, and foul with the mud and refuse 
into which he crawled, can hardly be known 
as human, save for this one gleam of some- 
thing beyond the human. Gaunt forms 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 141 

barely covered with rags, hollow eyes fierce 
with hunger, meet one at every turn in this 
early morning; and for many there is not 
even the penny, and they wait, sometimes 
with appeal, but as often silently, the chance 
gift of the buyer. Food for all the world, 
it would seem, and yet London is not fed ; 
and having once looked upon these waifs 
that are floated against the pillars of the old 
market, one fancies almost a curse on the 
piles of food that is not for them save as 
charity gives it, and the flowers that even 
on graves will never be theirs. 

Men and women huddle here, and under 
the arches, children skulk away like young 
rats, feeding on offal, lying close in dark cor- 
ners for warmth, and hunted about also like 
rats. It is a poverty desperate and horrible 
beyond that that any other civilized city can 
show ; and who shall say who is responsible, 
or what the end will be ? 

So the question lingers with one, as the 
market is left, and one passes on and out 
to the Strand and its motley stream of life, 
lingering through Fleet Street and the wind- 
ing ways into the City, past St. Paul's, and 



142 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

still on till London Bridge is reached and the 
Borough is near. Fare as one may, north 
or south, west or east, there is no escape 
from the sullen roar of the great city, a roar 
like the beat of a stormy sea against cliffs. 
An hour and more ago, that perplexed and 
baffled luminary the sun has struggled up 
through strange shapes and hues of morning 
cloud, and for a few minutes asserted his 
right to rule. But the gleam of gold and 
crimson brought with him has given way to 
the grays and black which make up chiefly 
what the Londoners call sky, and over Lon- 
don Bridge one passes on into the dim gray- 
ness merging into something darker and 
more cheerless. On the Borough Boad there 
should be some escape, — that Borough Road 
on which the Canterbury Pilgrims rode out 
on a morning less complicated, it is certain, 
by fog and mist and smoke and soot than 
mornings that dawn for this generation. 
Every foot of the way is history; the old 
Tower at one's back, and the past as alive 
as the present. " Merrie England " was at 
its best, they say, when the pages we know 
were making ; but here as elsewhere, the name 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 143 

is a tradition, belied by every fact of the 
present. 

The old inns along the way still hold their 
promise of good cheer, and the great kitchens 
and tap-rooms have seen wild revelry enough ; 
but even for them has been the sight of po- 
litical or other martyr done to death in their 
court-yards, while no foot of playground, no 
matter how much the people's own, but has 
been steeped in blood and watered with tears 
of English matron and maid. If " Merrie 
England " deserved its name, it must have 
come from a determination as fixed as Mark 
Tapley's, to be jolly under any and all cir- 
cumstances, and certainly circumstances have 
done their best to favor such resolution. The 
peasant of the past, usually represented as 
dancing heavily about a Maypole, or gazing 
contentedly at some procession of his lords 
and masters as it swept by, has no counter- 
part to-day, nor will his like come again. 
For here about the old Borough, where every 
stone means history and the " making of the 
English people," there are faces of all types 
that England holds, but no face yet seen car- 
ries any sense of merriment, or any good 



144 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

thing that might bear its name. It is the 
burden of living that looks from dull eyes 
and stolid faces, and a hopelessness, uncon- 
cious it may be but always apparent, that 
better things may come. The typical Eng- 
lishman, as we know him, has but occasional 
place, and the mass, hurrying to and fro in 
the midst of this roar of traffic, are thin and 
eager and restless of countenance as any crowd 
of Americans in the same type of surround- 
ings. Innumerable little streets, each dingier 
and more sordid than the last, open on either 
side. Hot coffee and cocoa cans are at every 
corner, their shining brass presided over by 
men chiefly. Here, as throughout East Lon- 
don, sellers of every sort of eatable and drink- 
able thing wander up and down. 

Paris is credited with living most of its life 
under all men's eyes, and London certainly 
may share this reputation as far as eating 
goes. In fact, working London, taking the 
poorest class both in pay and rank, has small 
space at home for much cookery, and finds 
more satisfaction in the flavor of food pre- 
pared outside. The throats, tanned and 
parched by much beer, are sensitive only to 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 145 

something with the most distinct and defined 
taste of its own ; and so it is that whelks and 
winkles and mussels and all forms of fish and 
flesh, that are to the American uneatably 
strong and unpleasant, make the luxuries of 
the English poor. They are conservative, 
also, like all the poor, and prefer old acquaint- 
ances to new ; and the costers and sellers of 
all sorts realize this, and seldom go beyond an 
established list. 

It is always " somethin' 'ot " that the work- 
man craves ; and small wonder, when one has 
once tested London climate, and found that, 
nine months out of twelve, fog and mist creep 
chill into bones and marrow, and that a fire is 
comfortable even in July. November accents 
this fact sharply, and by November the pea- 
soup and eel-soup men are at their posts, 
and about market and dock, and in lane and 
alley, the trade is brisk. Near Petticoat Lane, 
one of the oddest of London's odd corners, 
small newsboys rush up and take a cupful 
as critically as I have seen them take 
waffles from the old women purveyors of 
these delicacies about City Hall Park and 
Park Eow, while hungry costers and work- 

10 



146 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

men appear to find it the most satisfactory of 
meals. 

One must have watched the eel baskets at 
Billingsgate, and then read the annual con- 
sumption, before it is possible to understand 
how street after street has its eel-pie house, 
and how the stacks of small pies in the win- 
dows are always disappearing and always be- 
ing renewed. It would seem with eel pies as 
with oysters, of which Sam Weller stated his 
conviction that the surprising number of 
shops and stalls came from the fact that the 
moment a man found himself in difficulties he 
" rushed out and ate oysters in reg'lar desper- 
ation." It is certain that some of the eaters 
look desperate enough ; but the seller is a 
middle-aged, quiet-looking man, who eyes his 
customers sharply, but serves them with gen- 
erous cupfuls. The sharpness is evidently 
acquired, and not native, and he has need of 
it, the London newsboys, who are his best 
patrons, being ready to drive a bargain as 
keen as their fellows on the other side of the 
sea. His stand is opposite a cat's-meat mar- 
ket, a sausage shop in significant proximity, 
and he endures much chaffing as to the make- 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 147 

up of his pea soup, which he sells in its sea- 
son. But it is eels for which the demand is 
heaviest and always certain, and the eel-soup 
man's day begins early and ends late, on Sat- 
urdays lasting well into Sunday morning. 
He is prosperous as such business goes, and 
buys four " draughts " of eels on a Friday 
for the Saturday's work, a " draught " be- 
ing twenty pounds, while now and then he 
has been known to get rid of a hundred 
pounds. 

This stall, to which the newsboys flock as 
being more " stylish " than most of its kind, 
is fitted with a cast-iron fireplace holding two 
large kettles of four or five gallon capacity. 
A dozen pint bowls, or basins as the English- 
man prefers to call them, and an equal num- 
ber of half-pint cups, with spoons for all, 
constitute the outfit ; and even for the poorest 
establishment of the sort, a capital of not less 
than a pound is required. This stall has four 
lamps with " Hot Eels " painted on them, and 
one side of it is given to whelks, which are 
boiled at home and always eaten cold with 
abundance of vinegar, of which the newsboy 
is prodigal. At times fried fish are added to 



148 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

the stock, but eels lead, and mean the largest 
profit on the amount invested. 

Dutch eels are preferred, and the large 
buyer likes to go directly to the eel boats at 
the Billingsgate Wharf and buy the squirm- 
ing draughts, fresh from the tanks in which 
they have been brought. To dress and pre- 
pare a draught takes about three hours, and 
the daughter of the stall-owner stands at one 
side engaged in this operation, cleaning, wash- 
ing, and cutting up the eels into small pieces 
from half an inch to an inch long. These are 
boiled, the liquor being made smooth and 
thick with flour, and flavored with chopped 
parsley and mixed spices, principally all- 
spice. For half a penny, from five to seven 
pieces may be had, the cup being then filled 
up with the liquor, to which the buyer is al- 
lowed to add vinegar at discretion. There is 
a tradition of one customer so partial to hot 
eels that he used to come twice a day and 
take eight cupfuls a day, four at noon and 
four as a night-cap. 

The hot-eel season ends with early autumn, 
and pea soup takes its place, though a small 
proportion of eels is always to be had. Split 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 149 

peas, celery, and beef bones are needed for 
this, and it is here that the cat's-meat man is 
supposed to be an active partner. In any 
case the sme]l is savory, and the hot steam a 
constant invitation to the shivering passers- 
by. This man has no cry of " Hot Eels ! " 
like many of the sellers. 

" I touches up people's noses ; 't ain 't their 
heyes or their hears I'm haffcer," he says, 
though the neat stall makes its own claim on 
the " heyes." 

In another alley is another pea-soup man, 
one-legged, but not at all depressed by this or 
any other circumstance of fate. He makes, 
or his wife makes, the pea soup at home, and 
he keeps it hot by means of a charcoal fire in 
two old tin saucepans. 

" Hard work?" he says. "You wouldn't 
think so if you'd been on your back seven 
months and four days in Middlesex Orspital. 
I was a coal heaver, and going along easy and 
natural over the plank from one barge to 
another, and there come the swell from some 
steamers and throwed up the plank and 
chucked me off, and I broke my knee against 
the barge. It's bad now. I'd ought to 'ad 



150 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

it hoff, an' so the surgeons said ; but I 
wouldn't, an' me wife wouldn't, and the 
bone keeps workin' out, and I 've 'ad nine- 
teen months all told in the 'orspital, and Lord 
knows how me wife and the young uns got 
on. I was bad enough off, I was, till a neigh- 
bor o' mine, a master butcher, told me there 
was a man up in Clare Market, makin' a for- 
tune at hot eels and pea soup, and he lent me 
ten shillings to start in that line. He and me 
wife 's the best friends I 've ever had in the 
world ; for I 've no memory of a mother, and 
me father died at sea. My oldest daughter, 
she 's a good un, goes for the eels and cuts 
'em up, and she an' me wife does all the hard 
work. I 've only to sit at the stall and sell, 
and they do make 'em tasty. There 's no 
better. But we 're hard up. I 'd do better 
if I'd a little more money to buy with. I 
can't get a draught like some of the men, and 
them that gets by the quantity can give 
more. The boys tells me there 's one man 
gives 'em as much as eight pieces ; that 's 
what they calls a lumping ha'p'worth. And 
the liquor 's richer when you boils up so many 
eels. What's my tin pot ag'in' his five-gal- 



FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 151 

Ion one ? There 's even some that boils the 
'eads, and sells 'em for a farthing a cupful ; 
but I 've not come to that. But we 're badly 
off. The missus has a pair o' shoes, and she 
offs with 'em when my daughter goes to mar- 
ket, and my boy the youngest 's got no 
shoes ; but we do very well, and would do 
better, only the cheap pie shop takes off a lot 
o' trade. I would n't eat them pies. It 's 
the dead eels that goes into 'em, and we that 
handles eels knows well enough that they're 
rank poison if they ain't cut up alive, and the 
flesh of 'em squirming still when they goes 
into the boiling water. Them pies is uncer- 
tain, anyway, whatever kind you buy. I 've 
seen a man get off a lot a week old, just with 
the dodge of hot spiced gravy poured out of 
an oil can into a hole in the lid, and that 
gravy no more 'n a little brown flour and 
water ; but the spice did it. The cat's-meat 
men knows ; oh, yes ! they knows what be- 
comes of what's left when Saturday night 
comes, though I 've naught to say ag'in' the 
cat's-meat men, for it 's a respectable business 
enough. 

" I 've thought of other ways. There 's 



152 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

the baked-potato men, but the 'ansome can 
and fixings for keeping 'em 'ot is what costs, 
you see. Trotters is profitable, too, if you've 
a start, that is, though it 's women mostly that 
'andles trotters, blest if I know why ! I 've a 
cousin in the boiled pudding business — meat 
puddings and fruit, too j — but it 's all going 
out, along of the bakers that don't give poor 
folks a chance. They has their big coppers, 
and boils up their puddings by the 'undred ; 
but I dare say there 's no more need o' street- 
sellers, for folks go to shops for most things 
now. She 's in Leather Lane, this cousin o' 
mine, and makes plum-dufF as isn't to be 
beat ; but she sells Saturday nights mostly, 
and for Sunday dinners. Ginger nuts goes 
off well, but there again the shops 'as you, 
and unless you can make a great show, with 
brass things shining to put your eyes out, 
and a stall that looks as well as a shop, you 're 
nowhere. There 's no chance for the poor 
anyhow, it seems to me ; for even if you get 
a start, there 's always some one with more 
money to do the thing better, and so take 
the bread out of your mouth. But 6 bet- 
ter' 's only more show often, and me wife 



FROM COVEJSTT GARDEN TO THE BOROUGH. 153 

can't be beat for tastiness, whether it 's hot 
eels or pea soup, and I '11 say that long as I 
stand,' ' 

So many small trades have been ruined by 
the larger shops taking them up, that the 
street seller's case becomes daily a more com- 
plicated one, and the making a living by old- 
fashioned and time-honored methods almost 
impossible. It is all part of the general prob- 
lem of the day, and the street-sellers, whether 
costers or those of lower degree, look forward 
apprehensively to changes which seem on the 
way, and puzzle their untaught minds as to 
why each avenue of livelihood seems more 
and more barred against them. For the 
poorest there seems only a helpless, dumb 
acquiescence in the order of things which 
they are powerless to change ; but the looker- 
on, who watches the mass of misery crowding 
London streets or hiding away in attic and 
cellar, knows that out of such conditions sud- 
den fury and revolt is born, and that, if the 
prosperous will not heed and help while they 
may, the time comes when help will be with 
no choice of theirs. It is plain that even the 
most conservative begin to feel this, and 



154 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

effort constantly takes more practical form ; 
but this is but the beginning of what must 
be, — the inauguration of a social revolution 
in ideas, and one to which all civilization 
must come. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 

A S investigation progresses, it becomes at 
"^^ times a question as to which of two great 
factors must dominate the present status of 
women as workers ; competition, which blinds 
the eyes to anything but the surest way of 
obtaining the proper per cent, or the inheri- 
ted Anglo-Saxon brutality, which, in its low- 
est form of manifestation, makes the English 
wife-beater. It is certain that the English 
workingwoman has not only the disabilities 
which her American sister also faces, — some 
inherent in herself, and as many arising from 
the press of the present system, — but added 
to this the apparent incapacity of the em- 
ployer to see that they have rights of any 
description whatsoever. Even the factory act 
and the various attempts to legislate in behalf 
of women and child workers strikes the aver- 
age employer as a gross interference with 



156 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

his constitutional rights. Where he can he 
evades. Where he cannot he is apt to grow 
purple over the impertinence of meddling re- 
formers who cannot let well-enough alone. 

Such a representative of one class of Eng- 
lish employers is to be found in a little street, 
not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, the 
great newspaper centre, where all day long 
one meets authors, editors, and journalists of 
every degree. Toward eight in the morning, 
as at the same hour in the evening, another 
crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds 
upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the count- 
less printing establishments of every grade, 
which are to be found in every street and 
court opening from or near Fleet Street. It 
is not newspaper interests alone that are rep- 
resented there. The Temple, Inner, Outer, 
and Middle, with the magnificent group of 
buildings, also a part of the Temple's work- 
ings — the new courts of law, have each and 
all their quota of law printing, and a throng 
made up of every order of ability, from the 
reader of Greek proof down to the folder 
of Mother Siegel's Almanac, hurries through 
Fleet Street to the day's work. 



WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 157 

In a building devoted to the printing and 
sending out of a popular weekly of the 
cheaper order, the lower rooms met all requi- 
sitions as to space and proper ventilation. 

"We have nothing to hide," said the man- 
ager, " nothing at all. You may go from top 
to bottom if you will." 

This was said at what appeared to be the 
end of an hour or two of going from room 
to room, watching the girls at work at the 
multitudinous phases involved, and wondering 
how energy enough remained after twelve 
hours of it, for getting home. 

A flight of dark little stairs led up to a 
region even darker, and he changed color as 
we turned toward them. 

"This is all temporary," he said hastily. 
" We are very much crowded for space, and 
we are going to move soon. We do the 
best we can in the mean time. It's only 
temporary." 

This was the reason for the darkness. 
Stumbling up the open stairs, hardly more 
than a ladder, one came into a half story 
added to the original building, and so low 
that the manager bowed his head as he en- 



158 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

tered ; nor was there any point at which he 
could stand freely upright, this well-fed Eng- 
lishman nearly six feet tall. For the girls 
there was no such difficulty, and nearly two 
hundred were packed into the space, in which 
folding and stitching machines ran by steam, 
while at long tables other branches of the 
same work were going on by hand. The 
noise and the heat from gas-jets, steam, and 
the crowd of workers made the place hideous. 
The girls themselves appeared in no worse 
condition than many others seen that day, 
but were all alike, pale and anemic. Their 
hours were from 8 A. m. to 8 p. m., with an 
hour for dinner, usually from one to two. 
The law also allows half an hour for tea, but 
in all cases investigated, this time is docked if 
the girl takes it. Cheap " cocoa rooms " are 
all about, where a cup of tea or cocoa and a 
bun may be had for twopence ; but even this 
is a heavy item to a girl who earns never 
more than ten shillings ($2.50) a week, and 
as often from four to seven or eight. No ar- 
rangement for making tea on the premises 
was to be found here or anywhere. 

a We mean to have a room," the employers 



WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 159 

said, " but we have so many expenses attend- 
ant on the growing business that there 
doesn't seem any chance yet." 

This employer brought his wage-book for- 
ward and showed with pride that several of 
his girls earned a pound a week ($5.00). But 
on turning back some pages, the record 
showed only fourteen and sixteen shillings 
for these same names, and after a pause the 
manager admitted that the pound had been 
earned by adding night work. 

This question of whether night work is ever 
done had been a most difficult one to deter- 
mine. The girls themselves declared that it 
often was, and that they liked it because they 
got three shillings and their breakfast; but 
the managers had in more than one case 
denied the charge with fury. 

"It's over- work/' the present one said, his 
eyes on the rows of figures. 

" When ? " asked my companion quietly, 
and he burst into a laugh. 

\ c You've got me this time," he said. 
" You've given your word not to mention 
names, so I don't mind telling you. It 's like 
this. There 's a new firm to be floated, and 



160 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD., 

they want two hundred thousand circulars on 
two days' notice. Of course it has to be 
night-work, and we put it through, but we 
give the girls time for supper, and provide a 
good breakfast, and there 's hundreds waiting 
for the chance. But you've seen for your- 
selves. Some of them make a pound a week. 
What in reason does a woman want of more 
than a pound a week ? " 

This remark is the stereotyped one of quite 
two-thirds the employers, whether men or 
women. The old delusion still holds that a 
man works for others, a woman solely for 
herself, and although each woman should ap- 
pear with those dependent upon her in entire 
or partial degree arranged in line, it would 
make no difference in the conviction. It is 
quite true that many married women work for 
pocket-money, and having homes, can afford 
to underbid legitimate workers. But they 
are the smallest proportion of this vast army 
of London toilers, whose pitiful wage is earned 
by a day's labor which happily has no coun- 
terpart in length with us, save among the 
lowest grade of needlewomen. 

In the case under present consideration pay 



WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 161 

for over-time was allowed at the rate of four- 
pence an hour and a penny extra. If late 
five minutes the* workwoman is fined two- 
pence, and if not there by nine is " drilled/' 
that is, sent away, or kept waiting near until 
two, when she goes on for half a day. If tardy, 
as must often happen with fogs and other 
causes, she is often " drilled" for a week, 
though " drilling " in this trade is used more 
often with men than with women, who are 
less liable to irregularities caused by drink. 
In some establishments the bait of sixpence 
a week for good conduct is offered, but this 
is deducted on the faintest pretext, and the 
worker fined as well, for any violation of reg- 
ulations tacit or written^ 

In another establishment piece-work alone 
was done, a popular almanac being folded 
at fourpence a thousand sheets. Railway 
tickets brought in from eight to ten shillings 
a week, and prize packages of stationery, 
fourpence a score, the folding and packing 
of prize doubling the length of time re- 
quired and thus lessening wages in the same 
ratio. 

I have given phases of this one trade in 
11 



162 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

detail, because the same general rules govern 
all. The confectionery workers' wages are at 
about the same rate, although a pound a 
week is almost unknown, the girls making 
from three shillings and sixpence (84c.) to 
fourteen and sixteen shillings weekly. A 
large " butter-scotch " factory pays these 
rates and allows the weekly good-conduct 
sixpence, which, however, few succeed in 
earning. This factory is managed by two 
brothers who take alternate weeks, and the 
younger one exacts from the girls an hour 
more a day than the older one. Here the 
factory act applies, and inspectors appear peri- 
odically ; but this does not hinder the carrying 
out of individual theories as to what consti- 
tutes a day. If five minutes late, sevenpence 
is deducted from the week's wages, which 
begin at three and sixpence and ascend to 
nine, the latter price being the utmost to be 
earned in this branch of the trade. 

In the cocoa rooms which are to be found 
everywhere in London where business of any 
sort is carried on, the pay ranges from ten to 
twelve shillings a week. The work is hard 
and incessant, although hours are often 



WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 163 

shorter. In both confectionery factories and 
the majority of factory trades, an hour is 
allowed for dinner, but the tea half hour re- 
fused or deducted from time. London in this 
respect, and indeed in most points affecting 
the comfort and well-being of operatives of 
every class, is far behind countries, the great 
manufacturing cities of which are doing much 
to lighten oppressive conditions and give some 
possibility of relaxation and improvement. 
Some of the best reforms in a factory life 
have begun in England, and it is thus all the 
more puzzling to find that indifference, often 
to a brutal degree, characterizes the attitude 
of many London employers, w r ho have reduced 
wages to the lowest, and brought profits to the 
highest, attainable point. It is true that he is 
driven by a force often quite beyond his con- 
trol, foreign competition, French and German, 
being no less sharp than that on his own soil. 
He must study chances of profit to a farthing, 
and in such study there is naturally small 
thought of his workers, save as hands in which 
the farthings may be found. Many a woman 
goes to her place of work, leaving behind her 
children who have breakfasted with her on 



164 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

" kettle broth/' and will be happy if the same 
is certain at supper time. 

" There's six of us have had nought but 
kettle broth for a fortnight/' said one. " You 
know what that is ? It 's half a quarter loaf, 
soaked in hot water with a hap'orth of drip- 
ping and a spoonful of salt. When you've 
lived on that night and morning for a week 
or two, you can't help but long for a change, 
though, God forgive me ! there 's them that 
fares worse. But it '11 be the broth without 
the bread before we 're through. There 's no 
living to be had in old England any more, 
and yet the rich folks don't want less. Do 
you know how it is, ma'am ? Is there any 
chance of better times, do you think ? Is it 
that they want us to starve ? I 've heard that 
said, but somehow it seems as if there must 
be hearts still, and they '11 see soon, and then 
things '11 be different. Oh, yes, they must be 
different." 

Will they be different? It is unskilled 
workers who have just spoken, but do the 
skilled fare much better ? I append a por- 
tion of a table of earnings, prepared a year or 
two since by the chaplain of the Clerken- 



WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES. 165 

well prison, a thoughtful and earnest worker 
among the poor, this table ranking as one of 
the best of the attempts to discover the actual 
position of the workingwoman at present : — 

" Making paper bags, 4Jc?. to b\d. per thousand ; 
possible earnings, 5s. to 9s. a week. Button-holes, 
3d. per dozen ; possible earnings, 8s. per week. 

" Shirts 2d. each, worker finding her own cot- 
ton ; can get six done between 6 a. m. and 11 p. m. 

" Sack-sewing, Qd. for twenty-five, 8d. to Is. Qd. 
per hundred ; possible earnings, 7s. per week. 

" Pill-box making, Is. for thirty-six gross ; pos- 
sible earnings, Is. 3d. a day. 

" Button-hole making, Id. per dozen ; can do 
three or four dozen between 5 a. m. and dark. 

"Whip-making, Is. per dozen; can do a dozen 
per day. 

" Trousers-finishing, 3d. to bd. each, finding own 
cotton ; can do four per day. 

" Shirt-finishing, 3d. to 4i. per dozen." 

So the list runs on through all the trades 
open to women. A pound a week is a for- 
tune ; half or a third of that amount the 
wages of two-thirds the women who earn in 
working London; nor are there indications that 
the scale will rise or that better days are in 



166 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

store for one of these toilers, patient, heavy- 
eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come, 
and yet saying among themselves the words 
already given : — 

" There must be hearts still, and they'll 
see soon, and then things '11 be different. Oh, 
yes, they must be different." 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. 

TT is but a narrow streak of silver main 
A that separates the two countries, whose 
story has been that of constant mutual dis- 
trust, varied by intervals of armed truce, in 
which each nation elected to believe that it 
understood the other. Not only the nation as a 
whole, however, but the worker in each, is far 
from any such possibility ; and the methods of 
one are likely to remain, for a long time to 
come, a source of bewilderment to the other. 
That conditions on both sides of the Channel 
are in many points at their worst, and that 
the labor problem is still unsolved for both 
England and the Continent, remains a truth, 
though it is at once evident to the student of 
this problem that France has solved one or 
two phases of the equation over which Eng- 
land is still quite helpless. 



168 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

There is a famous chapter in the history of 
Ireland, entitled " Snakes in Ireland/' the con- 
tents of which are as follows : — 

u There are no snakes in Ireland." 

On the same principle it becomes at once 
necessary in writing on the slums of Paris/ 
to arrange the summary of the situation : 
" There are no slums in Paris." 

In the English sense there certainly are 
none ; and for the difference in visible condi- 
tions, several causes are responsible. The 
searcher for such regions discovers before the 
first da} r ends that there are none practically ; 
and though now and then, as all byways are 
visited, one finds remnants of old Paris, and a 
court or narrow lane in which crime might 
lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there 
is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, 
and the hideous squalor of London is abso- 
lutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be 
excepted in this statement, and with that we 
are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a 
London garret or the shop-worker in the nar- 
row rooms of th& East End lives in a gloom 
for which there is neither outward nor inward 
alleviation. Soot is king of the great city, 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. 169 

and his prime ministers. Smoke and Fog, work 
together to darken every haunt of man, and 
to shut out every glimpse of sun or moon. 
The flying flakes are in the air. Every breath 
draws them in ; every moment leaves its de- 
posit on wall and floor and person. The neat- 
est and most determined fighter of dirt must 
still be bond slave to its power; and eating 
and drinking and breathing soot all day and 
every day, there comes at last an acquiescence 
in the consequences, and only an instinctive 
battle with the outward effects. 

For the average worker, at the needle at 
least, wages are too low to admit of much 
soap ; hot water is equally a luxury, and time 
if taken means just so much less of the scanty 
pay; and thus it happens that London poverty 
takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that 
the visitor in the house of the workers learns 
to wear a uniform which shows as little as 
possible of the results of rising up and sitting 
down in the soot, which, if less evident in the 
home of the millionnaire, works its will no 
less surely. 

Fresh from such experience, and with the 
memory of home and work room, manufac- 



170 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

tory or great shop, all alike sombre and de- 
pressing, the cleanliness of Paris, enforced by 
countless municipal regulations, is at first a 
constant surprise. The French workwoman, 
even of the lowest order, shares in the na- 
tional characteristic which demands a fair 
exterior whatever may be the interior condi- 
tion, and she shares also in the thrift which is 
equally a national possession, and the exercise 
of which has freed France from the largest 
portion of her enormous debt. The English 
workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser- 
stitcher or bag-maker, is not only worn and 
haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform of 
ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which rep- 
resent the extremity of dejection. She clings 
to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of 
respectability and to the shawl no less ; but the 
first has reached a point wherein it is not 
only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of 
flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint 
of ornamentation having long ago yielded to 
weather and age and other agents of destruc- 
tion. The shawl 6r cloak is no less abject 
and forlorn, both being the badge of a condi- 
tion from which emergence has become prac- 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. 171 

tically impossible. These lank figures carry 
no charm of womanhood, — nothing that can 
draw from sweater or general employer more 
than a sneer at the quality of the labor of those 
waiting always in numbers far beyond any real 
demand, until for both the adjective comes to 
be " superfluous/' and employer and employed 
alike wonder why the earth holds them, and 
what good there is in an existence made up 
simply of want and struggle. 

Precisely the opposite condition holds for 
the French worker, who, in the midst of prob- 
lems as grave, faces them with the light-heart- 
edness of her nation. She has learned to the 
minutest fraction what can be extracted from 
every centime, and though she too must 
shiver with cold, and go half-fed and half- 
clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of 
something better, and to-day is thus made 
more bearable. She shares too the convic- 
tion, which has come to be part of the general 
faith concerning Paris, which seems always 
an embodied assurance, that sadness and want 
are impossible. Even her beggars, a good 
proportion of them laboriously made up for 
the parts they are to fill, find repression of 



172 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

cheerfulness their most difficult task, and 
smile confidingly on the sceptical observer of 
their methods, as if to make him a partner in 
the encouraging and satisfactory nature of 
things in general. The little seamstress who 
descends from her attic for the bread with its 
possible salad or bit of cheese which will form 
her day's ration, smiles also as she pauses to 
feel the thrill of life in the thronging boule- 
vards and beautiful avenues, the long sweeps 
of which have wiped out for Paris as a whole 
everything that could by any chance be 
called slum. 

Even in the narrowest street this stir of 
eager life penetrates, and every Parisian 
shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily 
existence. If shoes are too great a luxury, 
the workwoman clatters along in sabots, con- 
gratulating herself that they are cheap and 
that they never wear out. Custom, long- 
established and imperative, orders that she 
shall wear no head-covering ? and thus she es- 
capes the revelation bound up in the Lon- 
don worker's bonnet. Inherited instinct and 
training from birth have taught her hands the 
utmost skill with the needle. She makes her 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. 173 

own dress, and wears it with an air which may 
in time transfer itself to something choicer ; 
and this quality is in no whit affected by the 
the cheapness of the material. It may be 
only a print or some woollen stuff of the poor- 
est order • but it and every detail of her dress 
represent something to which the English 
woman has not attained, and which tempera- 
ment and every fact of life will hinder her 
attaining. 

As I write, the charcoal-woman has climbed 
the long flights to the fifth floor, bending 
under the burden of an enormous sack of 
charbon a terre,but smiling as she puts it down. 
She is mistress of a little shop just round the 
corner, and she keeps the accounts of the 
wood and coal bought by her patrons by a 
system best known to herself, her earnings 
hardly going beyond three francs a day. 
Even she, black with the coal-dust which she 
wastes no time in scrubbing off save on Sun- 
days when she too makes one of the throng 
in the boulevards, faces the hard labor with 
light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a 
sou here and there for the dot of the baby 
who shares in the distribution of coal-dust, 



174 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

and will presently trot by her side as 
assistant. 

In the laundry just beyond, the women 
are singing or chattering, the voices rising in 
that sudden fury of words which comes upon 
this people, and makes the foreigner certain 
that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs in- 
stantly and peacefully, to rise again on due 
occasion. Long hours, exhausting labor, small 
wages, make no difference. The best worker 
counts from three to four francs daily as pros- 
perity, and the rate has even fallen below 
this ; yet they make no complaint, quite con- 
tent with the sense of companionship, and 
with the satisfaction of making each article 
as perfect a specimen of skill as can be 
produced. 

Here lies a difference deeper than that of 
temperament, — the fact that the French 
worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and 
counts its satisfactory appearance as a portion 
of the reward. Slop work, with its demand 
for speedy turning out of as many specimens 
of the poorest order per day as the hours will 
allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the 
French workwoman ; and thus it happens that 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS. 175 

even slop work on this side of the Channel 
holds some hint of ornamentation and the 
desire to lift it out of the depth to which it 
has fallen. But it is gaining ground, fierce 
competition producing this effect everywhere ; 
and the always lessening ratio of wages which 
attends its production, must in time bring 
about the same disastrous results here as else- 
where, unless the tide is arrested, and some 
form of co-operative production takes its 
place. With the French worker in the higher 
forms of needle industry we shall deal in the 
next chapter, finding what differences are to 
be met here also between French and English 
methods. 



CHAPTER XV. 

FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS. 

" "V7TES, it is the great shops that have done 
A that, madame. Once, you saw what 
was only well finished and a credit to the 
worker, and, even if the reward was small, 
she had pride in the work and her own skill, 
and did always her best. But now, what will 
you? The thing must be cheap, cheapest. 
The machine to sew hurries everything, and 
you find the workwoman sans ambition and 
busy only to hurry and be one with the ma- 
chine. It is wrong, all wrong, but that is 
progress, and one must submit. When the 
small shops had place to live, and the great 
magasins were not for ladies or any who 
wished the best, then it was different, but now 
all is changed, and Work has no character. It 
is all the same ; always the machine." 

More than once this plaint has been made, 



FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS. 177 

and the sewing-machine accused as the cause 
of depression in wages, of deterioration of all 
hand needlework, and of the originality that 
once distinguished French productions ; and 
there is some truth in the charge, not only for 
Paris, but for all cities to which needlewomen 
throng. Machinery has gradually revolution- 
ized all feminine industries in Paris, and its 
effect is not only on the general system of 
wages, but upon the moral condition of the 
worker, and family life as a whole has become 
to the student of social questions one of 
gravest importance. On the one hand is 
the conviction, already quoted, that it has 
brought with it deterioration in every phase 
of the work ; on the other, that it is an edu- 
cating and beneficent agent, raising the gen- 
eral standard of wages, and putting three 
garments where once but one could be owned. 
It is an old story, and will give food for 
speculation in the future, quite as much as 
in the past. But in talking with skilled work- 
ers, from dressmakers to the needlewomen 
employed on trousseaux and the most deli- 
cate forms of this industry, each has expressed 

the same conviction, and this quite apart from 

12 



178 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

the political economist's view that there must 
be a return to hand production, if the stand- 
ard is not to remain hopelessly below its old 
place. Such return would not necessarily 
exclude machinery, which must be regarded as 
an indispensable adjunct to the worker's life. 
It would simply put it in its proper place, — 
that of aid, but never master. It is the spirit 
of competition w 7 hich is motive power to-day, 
and which drives the whirring wheels and 
crowds the counters of every shop with pro- 
ductions which have no merit but that of 
cheapness, and the price of which means no 
return to the worker beyond the barest sub- 
sistence. 

Subsistence in Paris has come to mean 
something far different from the facts of a 
generation ago. Wages have always been 
fixed at a standard barely above subsistence ; 
but, even under these conditions, French fru- 
gality has succeeded not only in living, but 
in putting by a trifle month by month. As 
the great manufactories have sprung up, pos- 
sibilities have lessened and altered, till the 
workwoman, however cheerfully she may face 
conditions, knows that saving has become im- 



FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS. 179 

possible. If, in some cases, wages have risen, 
prices have advanced with them till only ne- 
cessities are possible, the useful having dropped 
away from the plan, and the agreeable ceased 
to have place even in thought. Even before 
the long siege, and the semi-starvation that 
came to all within the walls of Paris, prices 
had been rising, and no reduction has come 
w r hich even approximates to the old figures. 
Every article of daily need is at the highest 
point, sugar alone being an illustration of 
what the determination to protect an industry 
has brought about. The London workwoman 
buys a pound for one penny, or at the most 
twopence. The French workwoman must 
give eleven or twelve sous, and then have 
only beet sugar, which has not much over 
half the saccharine quality of cane sugar. 
Flour, milk, eggs, all are equally high, meat 
alone being at nearly the same prices as in 
London. Fruit is a nearly impossible luxury, 
and fuel so dear that shivering is the law for 
all but the rich, while rents are also far be- 
yond London prices, with no " improved 
dwellings" system to give the utmost for the 
scanty sum at disposal. For the needle- 



180 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

woman the food question has resolved itself 
into bread alone, for at least one meal, with 
a little coffee, chiefly chicory, and possibly 
some vegetable for the others. But many 
a one lives on bread for six days in the week, 
reserving the few sous that can be saved for 
a Sunday bit of meat, or bones for soup. 
Even the system which allows of buying 
" portions/' just enough for a single indi- 
vidual, is valueless for her, since the smallest 
and poorest portion is far beyond the sum 
which can never be made to stretch far 
enough for such indulgence. 

"I have tried it, madame," said the same 
speaker, who had mourned over the degenera- 
tion of finish among the workwomen. " It 
was the siege that compelled it in the begin- 
ning, and then there was no complaining, 
since it was the will of the good God for all. 
But there came a time when sickness had 
been with me long, and I found no work 
but to stitch in my little room far up under 
the roof, and all the long hours bringing so 
little, — never more than two and a half 
francs, and days when it was even less ; and 
then I found how one must live. I was proud, 



FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS. 181 

and wished to tell no one ; but there was an 
ouvriere next me, in a little room, even smaller 
than mine, and she saw well that she could 
help, and that together some things might be 
possible that were not alone. She had her 
furnace for the fire, and we used it together 
on the days when we could make our soup, 
or the coffee that I missed more than all, — 
more, even, than wine, which is for us the 
same as water to you. It was months that I 
went not beyond fifty centimes a day for 
food, save the Sundays, and then but little 
more, since one grows at last to care little, 
and a good meal for one day makes the next 
that is wanting harder, I think, than when 
one wants always. But I am glad that I 
know; so glad that I could even wish the 
same knowledge for many who say, ' Why do 
they not live on what they earn ? Why do 
they not have thrift, and make ready for old 
age ? ' Old age comes fast, it is true. Such 
years as I have known are double, yes, and 
treble, and one knows that they have short- 
ened life. But when I say now ' the poor/ I 
know what that word means, and have such 
compassion as never before. It is the workers 



182 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

who are the real poor, and for them there is 
little hope, since it is the system that must 
change. It is the middleman who makes the 
money, and there are so many of them, how 
can there be much left for the one who comes 
last, and is only the machine that works ? 

" All that is true of England, and I have 
had two years there, and thus know well ; 
all that is true, too, here, though we know 
better how we can live, and not be always so 
triste and sombre. But each day, as I go by 
the great new shops that have killed all the 
little ones, and by the great factory where 
electricity makes the machines go, and the 
women too become machines, — each day I 
know that these counters, where one can buy 
for a song, are counters where flesh and blood 
are sold. For, madame, it is starvation for 
the one who has made these garments ; and 
why must one woman starve that another may 
wear what her own hands could make if she 
would ? Everywhere it is occasions [bargains] 
that the great shops advertise. Everywhere 
they must be more and more, and so wages 
lessen, till there is no more hope of living ; 
and, because they lessen, marriage waits, and 



FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS. 183 

all that the good God meant for us waits 
also." 

On the surface it is all well. There is less 
incompetency among French than English 
workers, and thus the class who furnish them 
need less arraignment for their lack of thor- 
oughness. They contend, also, with one form 
of competition, which has its counterpart in 
America among the farmers' wives, who take 
the work at less than regular rates. This 
form is the convent work, which piles the 
counters, and is one of the most formidable 
obstacles to better rates for the worker. In- 
numerable convents make the preparation of 
underwear one of their industries, and, in the 
classes of girls whom they train to the needle, 
find workers requiring no wages, the training 
being regarded as equivalent. Naturally, their 
prices can be far below the ordinary market 
one, and thus the worker, benefited on the 
one hand, is defrauded on the other. In 
short, the evil is a universal one, — an integral 
portion of the present manufacturing system, 
— and its abolition can come only from roused 
public sentiment, and combination among the 
workers themselves. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE CITY OF THE SUtf. 

TT is only with weeks of experience that the 
searcher into the under world of Paris 
life comes to any sense of real conditions, or 
discovers in what directions to look for the 
misery which seldom floats to the surface, and 
which even wears the face of content. That 
there are no slums, and that acute suffering 
is in the nature of things impossible, is the 
first conviction, and it remains in degree even 
when both misery and its lurking-places have 
become familiar sights. Paris itself, gay, 
bright, beautiful, beloved of every dweller 
within its walls, so dominates that shadows 
seem impossible, and as one watches the 
eager throng in boulevard or avenue, or the 
laughing, chattering groups before even the 
poorest cafe, other life than this sinks out 
of sight. The most meagrely paid needle- 



THE CITY OF THE SUN. 185 

woman, the most overworked toiler in trades, 
indoors or out, seizes any stray moment for 
rest or small pleasures, and from a half-franc 
bottle of wine, or some pretence of lemonade 
or sugar water, extracts entertainment for 
half a dozen. The pressure in actual fact re- 
mains the same. Always behind in the 
shadow lurks starvation, and there is one 
street, now very nearly wiped out, known to 
its inhabitants still as " la rue ou Von ne meurt 
jamais " — the street where one never dies, 
since every soul therein finds their last bed in 
the hospital. This is the quartier Mouffetard, 
where bits of old Paris are still discernible, 
and where strange trades are in operation ; 
industries which only a people so pinched and 
driven by sharp necessity could ever have 
invented. 

The descent to these is a gradual one, and 
most often the women who are found in them 
have known more than one occupation, and 
have been, in the beginning at least, needle- 
women of greater or less degree of skill. 
Depression of wages, which now are at the 
lowest limit of subsistence, drives them into 
experiments in other directions, and often 



186 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

failing sight or utter weariness of the mono- 
tonous employment is another cause. These 
form but a small proportion of such workers, 
who generally are a species of guild, a family 
having begun some small new industry and 
gradually drawn in others, till a body of 
workers in the same line is formed, strong 
enough to withstand any interlopers, 

u What becomes of the women who are too 
old to sew, and who have never gained skill 
enough to earn more than a bare living ? " 
I asked one day of a seamstress whose own 
skill was unquestioned, but who, even with 
this in her favor, averages only three francs a 
day. 

" They do many things, madame. One 
who is my neighbor is now scrubber and 
cleaner, and is happily friends with a ' con- 
cierge ,' who allows her to aid him. That is 
a difficulty for all who would do that work. 
It is that the ' concierges / whether men or 
women, think that any pay from the c loca- 
taires ' must be for them ; and so they will 
never tell the tenant of a woman who seeks 
work, but will say always, * It is I who can do 
it all. One cannot trust these from the out- 



THE CITY OF THE SUN. 187 

side.' But for her, as I say, there is oppor- 
tunity, and at last she has food, when as 
' couturiere ' it was quite — yes, quite im- 
possible. There was a child, an idiot — the 
child of her daughter who is dead, and from 
whom she refuses always to be separated, and 
she sews always on the sewing-machine, till 
sickness comes, and it is sold for rent and 
many things. She is proud. She has not 
wished to scrub and clean, but for such work 
is twenty-five centimes an hour, and often 
food that the tenant does not wish. At times 
they give her less, and in any case one calcu- 
lates always the time and watches very 
closely, but for her, at least, is more money 
than for many years ; sometimes even three 
francs, if a day has been good. But that is 
but seldom, and she must carry her own soap 
and brush, and pay for all. 

" That is one way, and there is another 
that fills me with terror, madame, lest I, too, 
may one day find myself in it. It is last and 
worst of all for women, I think. It is when 
they wear ' le cachemire d' osier? You do 
not know it, madame. It is the chiffonieress 
basket which she bears as a badge, and which 



188 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

she hangs at night, it may be, in the City of 
the Sun. Voila, madame. There are now 
two who are on their way. If madame has 
curiosity, it is easy to follow them." 

" But the City of the Sun ? What is that ? 
Do you mean Paris?" 

" No, madame. It is a mockery like the 
' cachemire d'osier' You will see." 

It is in this following that the polished 
veneer which makes the outward Paris 
showed what may lie beneath. Certainly, no 
one who walks through the Avenue Victor 
Hugo, one of the twelve avenues radiating 
from the Arc de Triomphe, and including 
some of the gayest and most brilliant life of 
modern Paris, the creation of Napoleon III. 
and of Baron Haussman, would dream that 
hint of corruption could enter in. The an- 
cient Rue de la Revolte has changed form 
and title, and the beautiful avenue is no dis- 
honor to its present name. But far down 
there opens nearly imperceptibly a narrow 
alley almost subterranean, and it is through 
this alley that the two figures which had 
moved silently down the avenue passed and 
went on ; the man solid and compact, as if 



THE CITY OF THE SUN. 189 

well-fed, his face as he turned, however, giv- 
ing the lie to such impression, but his keen 
alert eyes seeing every shade of difference in 
the merest scrap of calico or tufts of hair. 
For the woman, it was plain to see why the 
needle had been of small service, her wander- 
ing, undecided blue eyes passing over every- 
thing to which the mans hook had not first 
directed her. 

Through the narrow way the pair passed 
into a sombre court, closed at the end by a 
door of wood with rusty latch, which creaks 
and objects as one seeks to lift it. Once 
within, and the door closed, the place has no 
reminder of the Paris just without. On the 
contrary, it might be a bit from the beggars' 
quarter in a village of Syria or Palestine, for 
here is only a line of flat-roofed huts, the 
walls whitewashed, the floors level with the 
soil, and the sun of the warm spring day 
pouring down upon sleeping dogs, and heaps 
of refuse alternating with piles of rags, in the 
midst of which work two or three women, 
silent at present, and barely looking up as 
the new comers lay down their burdens. A 
fat yet acrid odor rises about these huts, 



190 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

drawn out from the rags by the afternoon 
heat; yet, repulsive as it is, there is more 
sense of cleanliness about it than in the 
hideous basements where the same trade is 
plied in London or New York. There is a 
space here not yet occupied by buildings. 
The line of huts faces the south ; a fence 
encloses them ; and so silent and alone seems 
the spot that it is easy to understand why it 
bears its own individual name, and to the 
colony of chiffoniers who dwell here has long 
been known as the City of the Sun. Doors 
stand open freely ; honesty is a tradition of 
this profession; and the police know that 
these delvers in dust heaps will bring to them 
any precious object found therein, and that 
he who should remove the slightest article 
from one of these dwellings would be ban- 
ished ignominiously and deprived of all rights 
of association. 

These huts are all alike ; two rooms, the 
larger reserved for the bed, the smaller for 
kitchen, and in both rags of every variety. 
In the corner is a heap chiefly of silk, wool, 
and linen. This is the pile from which rent 
is to come, and every precious bit goes to it, 



THE CITY OF THE SUN. 191 

since rent here is paid in advance, — three 
francs a week for the hut alone, and twenty 
francs a month if a scrap of court is added in 
which the rags can be sorted. On a fixed day 
the proprietor appears, and, if the sum is not 
ready, simply carries off the door and win- 
dows, and expels the unlucky tenant with no 
further formality. How the stipulated amount 
is scraped together, only the half-starved 
chiffoniers know, since prices have fallen so 
that the hundred kilogrammes (about two 
hundred pounds) of rags, which, before the 
war, sold for eighty francs, to-day bring pre- 
cisely eight. 

"In a good day, madame," said the woman, 
c 'w T e can earn three francs. We are always 
together, I and my man, and we never cease. 
But the dead season comes, that is, the sum- 
mer, when Paris is in the country or at the 
sea ; then we can earn never more than two 
francs, and often not more than thirty sous, 
when they clean the streets so much, and so 
carry away everything that little is left for 
us. It is five years that I have followed my 
man, and he is born to it, and works always, 
but the time is changed. There is no more 



192 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

a living in this, or in anything we can do. I 
have gone hungry when it is the sewing that 
I do, and I go hungry now, but I am not 
alone. It is so for all of us, and we care not 
if only the children are fed. They are not, 
and it is because of them that we suffer. 
See, madame, this is the child of my niece, 
who came with me here, and has also her 
man, but never has any one of them eaten to 
the full, even of crusts, which often are in 
what we gather." 

The child ran toward her, — a girl three or 
four years old, wearing a pair of women's 
shoes ten times too large, and the remainder 
of a chemise. Other clothing had not been 
attempted, or was not considered necessary, 
and the child looked up with hollow eyes and 
a face pinched and sharpened by want, while 
the swollen belly of the meagre little figure 
showed how wretched had been the supply 
they called food. All day these children fare 
as they can, since all day the parents must 
range the streets collecting their harvest ; but 
fortunately for such future as they can know, 
these little savages, fighting together like wild 
animals, have within the last twenty years 



THE CITY OF THE SUN. 193 

been gradually gathered into free schools, the 
work beginning with a devoted woman, who, 
having seen the City of the Sun, never rested 
till a school was opened for its children. All 
effort, however, was quite fruitless, till an old 
chiffonier, also once a seamstress, united with 
her, and persuaded the mothers that they must 
prepare their children, or, at least, not prevent 
them from going. At present the school stands 
as one of the wisest philanthropies of Paris, 
but neither this, nor any other attempt to 
better conditions, alters the fact that twelve 
and fourteen hours of labor have for sole 
result from thirty to forty sous a day, and 
that this sum represents the earnings of the 
average women-workers of Paris, the better 
class of trades and occupations being no less 
limited in possibilities. 



13 



CHAPTER XVII. 

DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS. 

"TFa revolution come again, I think well, 
madame, it will be the great shops that 
will fall,, and that it is workwomen who will 
bear the torch and even consent to the name 
of terror, petroleuses. For see a moment 
what thing they do, madame. Everywhere, 
the girl who desires to learn as modiste, and 
who, in the day when I had learned, became 
one of the house that she served, and, if 
talent were there, could rise and in time 
be mistress herself, with a name that had 
fame even, — that girl must now attempt 
the great shop and bury her talent in always 
the same thing. No more invention, no more 
grace, but a hundred robes always the same, 
and with no mark of difference for her who 
wears it, or way to tell which may be mistress 
and which the servant. It is not well for one 
or the other, madame ; it is ill for both. 



DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS. 195 

Then, too, many must stand aside who would 
learn, since it is always the machine to sew 
that needs not many. It is true there are 
still houses that care for a name, and where 
one may be artiste, and have pride in an 
inspiration. But they are rare ; and now one 
sits all day, and this one stitches sleeves, per- 
haps, or seams of waists or skirts, and knows 
not effects, or how to plan the whole, or any 
joy of composition or result. It is bad, and all 
bad, and I willingly would see the great shops 
go, and myself urge well their destruction." 

These words, and a flood of more in the 
same direction, came as hot protest against 
any visit to the Magasins du Louvre, an enor- 
mous establishment of the same order as the 
Bon Marche, but slightly higher in price, 
where hundreds are employed as saleswomen, 
and where, side by side with the most expen- 
sive productions of French skill, are to be 
found the occasions, — the bargains in which 
the foreigner delights even more than the 
native. 

"Let them go there," pursued the little 
modiste, well on in middle life, whose eager 
face and sad dark eyes lighted with indig- 



196 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

nation as she spoke. " Let those go there who 
have money, always money, but no taste, no 
perception, no feeling for a true combination. 
I know that if one orders a robe that one comes 
to regard to say, ' Yes, so and so must be for 
madame,' but how shall she know well when 
she is blunted and dead with numbers ? How 
shall she feel what is best ? I, madame, when 
one comes to me, I study. There are many 
things that make the suitability of a confec- 
tion ; there is not only complexion and figure 
and age, but when I have said all these, the 
thought that blends the whole and sees aris- 
ing what must be for the perfect robe. This 
was the method of Madame Desmoulins, and 
I have learned of her. When it is an impor- 
tant case, a trousseau perhaps, she has neither 
eaten nor slept till she has conceived her list 
and sees each design clear. And then what 
joy ! She selects, she blends with tears of hap- 
piness; she cuts with solemnity even. Is there 
such a spirit in your Bon Marche? Is 
there such a spirit anywhere but here and 
there to one who remembers:; who has an 
ideal and who refuses to make it less by sell- 
ing it in the shops ? Again, madame, I tell 



DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS, 197 

you it is a debasement so to do. I will none 
of it." 

Madame, who had clasped her hands and 
half risen in her excited protest, sank back in 
her chair and fixed her eyes on a robe just 
ready to send home, — a creation so simply ele- 
gant and so charming that her brow smoothed 
and she smiled, well pleased. But her words 
were simply the echo of others of the same 
order, spoken by others who had watched the 
course of women's occupations and who had 
actual love for the profession they had chosen. 

Questions brought out a state of things 
much the same for both Paris and London, 
where the system of learning the business 
had few differences. For both millinery and 
dressmaking, apprenticeship had been the rule, 
the more important houses taking an entrance 
fee and lessening the number of years re- 
quired ; the others demanding simply the full 
time of the learner, from two to four years. 
In these latter cases food and lodging were 
given, and after the first six months a small 
weekly wage, barely sufficient to provide the 
Sunday food and lodging. If more was paid, 
the learner lived outside entirely ; and the first 



198 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

year or two was a sharp struggle to make 
ends meet. But if any talent showed itself, 
promotion was rapid, and with it the prospect 
of independence in the end, the directress 
of a group of girls regarding such talent as 
developed by the house and a part of its rep- 
utation. In some cases such girls by the end 
of the third year received often five or six 
thousand francs, and in five were their own 
mistresses absolutely, with an income of ten 
or twelve thousand and often more. 

This for the exception ; for the majority 
was the most rigid training, — w r ith its result 
in what we know as French finish, w T hich is 
simply delicate painstaking with every item 
of the work, — and a wage of from thirty to 
forty francs a week, often below but seldom 
above this sum. 

In the early stages of the apprentice- 
ship there was simply an allowance of from 
six to ten francs per month for incidental 
expenses, and even when skill increased and 
services became valuable, five francs a week 
was considered an ample return. In all these 
cases the week passed under the roof of the 
employer, and Sunday alone became the ac- 



DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS. 199 

tual change of the worker. The excessive 
hours of the London apprentice had no coun- 
terpart here or had not until the great houses 
were founded and steam and electric power 
came with the sewing-machine. With this 
new regime over-time was often claimed, and 
two sous an hour allowed, these being given 
in special cases. But exhausting hours were 
left for the lower forms of needle-work. The 
food provided was abundant and good, and 
sharp overseer as madame might prove, she 
demanded some relaxation for herself and 
allowed it to her employes. The different 
conditions of life made over-work in Paris a 
far different thing from over-work in London. 
For both milliners and modistes was the keen 
ambition to develop a talent, and the work- 
room, as has already been stated, felt per- 
sonal pride in any member of the force who 
showed special lightness of touch or skill in 
combination. 

" Work, madame ! " exclaimed little Ma- 
dame M.,as she described a day's work under 
the system which had trained her. " But 
yes, I could not so work now, but then I saw r 
always before me an end. I had the senti- 



200 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

ment. It was always that the colors arranged 
themselves, and so with my sister, who is 
modiste and whose compositions are a marvel. 
My back has ached, my eyes have burned, I 
have seen sparks before them and have felt 
that I could no more, when the days are long 
and the heat perhaps is great, or even in win- 
ter crowded together and the air so heavy. 
But we laughed and sang ; we thought of a 
future ; we watched for talent, and if there 
was envy or jealousy, it was well smothered. 
I remember one talented Italian who would 
learn and who hated one other who had great 
gifts; hated her so, she has stabbed her sud- 
denly with sharp scissors in the arm. But 
such things are not often. We French care 
always for genius, even if it be but to make a 
shoe most perfect, and we do not hate — no, 
we love well, whoever shows it. But to-day 
all is different, and once more I say, madame, 
that too much is made, and that thus talent 
will die and gifts be no more needed." 

There is something more in this feeling 
than the mere sense of rivalry or money loss 
from the new system represented by the Bon 
Marche and other great establishments of the 



DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS. 201 

same nature. But this is a question in one 
sense apart from actual conditions, save as 
the concentration of labor has had its effect on 
the general rate of wages. Five francs a day 
is considered riches, and the ordinary worker 
or assistant in either dressmaking or millinery 
department receives from two and a half to 
three and a half francs, on which sum she 
must subsist as she can. With a home where 
earnings go into a common fund, or if the 
worker has no one dependent upon her, French 
thrift makes existence on this sum quite pos- 
sible ; but when it becomes a question of 
children to be fed and clothed, more than 
mere existence is impossible, and starvation 
stands always in the background. For the 
younger workers the great establishments, 
offer many advantages over the old system, 
and hours have been shortened and attempts 
made in a few cases to improve general con- 
ditions of those employed. But there is 
always a dull season, in which wages lessen, 
or even cease for a time, the actual number 
of working days averaging two hundred and 
eighty. Where work is private and reputa- 
tion is established, the year's earnings are a 



202 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

matter of individual ability, but the mass of 
workers in these directions drift naturally 
toward the great shops which may be found 
now in every important street of Paris, and 
which have altered every feature of the old 
system. Whether this alteration is a perma- 
nent one, is a question to which no answer 
can yet be made. Wages have reached a 
point barely above subsistence, and the out- 
look for the worker is a very shadowy one ; 
but the question as a whole has as yet small 
interest for any but the political economists, 
while the women themselves have no thought 
of organization or of any method of bettering 
general conditions, beyond the little societies 
to which some of the ordinary workers belong, 
and which are half religious, half educational, 
in their character. As a rule, these are for 
the lower ranks of needlewomen, but neces- 
sity will compel something more definite in 
form for the two classes we have been con- 
sidering, as well as for those below them, and 
the time approaches when this will be plain 
to the workers themselves, and some positive 
action take the place of the present dumb 
acceptance of whatever comes. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 

" TVT 0, madame, there is no more any old 
-*- Paris. The Paris that I remember is 

gone, all gone, save here and there a corner 
that soon they will pull down as all the rest. 
All changes, manners no less than these streets 
that I know not in their new dress, and where 
I go seeking a trace of what is past. It is 
only in the churches that one feels that all is 
the same, and even with them one wonders 
why, if it is the same, fewer and fewer 
come, and that men smile often at those that 
enter the doors, and would close them to us 
who still must pray in the old places. Is 
there that consolation for the worker in 
America, madame ? Can she forget her sor- 
row and want at a shrine that is holy, and 
feel the light resting on her, full of the glory 
of the painted windows and the color that is 



204 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

joy and rest ? Because, if there had not been 
the church, my St. Etienne du Mont, that I 
know from a child, if there had not been that, 
I must have died. And so I have wondered 
if your country had this gift also for the 
worker, and, if it has not bread enough, has 
at least something that feeds the soul. Is it 
so, madame ? " 

Poor old Rose, once weaver in silk and with 
cheeks like her name, looking at me now with 
her sad eyes, blue and clear still in spite of 
her almost seventy years, and full of the pa- 
tience born of long struggle and acceptance ! 
St. Etienne had drawn me as it had drawn 
her, and it was in the apse, the light streaming 
from the ancient windows, each one a marvel 
of color whose secret no man to-day has 
penetrated, that I saw first the patient face 
and the clasped hands of this suppliant, who 
prayed there undisturbed by any thought of 
watching eyes, and who rose presently and 
went slowly down the aisles, with a face that 
might have taken its place beside the pictured 
saints to whom she had knelt. Her sabots 
clicked against the pavement worn by many 
generations of feet, and her old fingers still 



A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 205 

moved mechanically, telling the beads which 
she had slipped out of sight. 

" You love the little church/' I said ; and she 
answered instantly, w r ith a smile that illumined 
the old face, " Indeed, yes ; and why not ? It 
is home and all that is good, and it is so beau- 
tiful, madame. There is none like it. I go 
to the others sometimes, above all to Notre 
Dame, which also is venerable and dear, and 
where one may worship well. But always I 
return here; for the great church seems to 
carry my prayers away, and they are half lost 
in such bigness, and it is not so bright and so 
joyous as this. For here the color lifts the 
heart, and I seem to rise in my soul also, and 
I know every pillar and ornament, for my 
eyes study often when my lips pray ; but it is 
all one worship, madame, else I should shut 
them close. But the good God and the saints 
know well that I am always praying, and that 
it is my St. Etienne that helps, and that is so 
beautiful I must pray when I see it." 

This was the beginning of knowing Eose, 
and in good time her whole story was told, — a 
very simple one, but a record that stands for 
many like it. There was neither discontent 



206 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

nor repining. Born among workers, she had 
filled her place, content to fill it, and only 
wondering as years went on why there were 
not better days, and, if they were to mend for 
others, whether she had part in it or not. 
Far up under the roof of an old house, clung 
to because it was old, Eose climbed, well sat- 
isfied after the minutes in the little church 
in which she laid down the burden that long 
ago had become too heavy for her, and which, 
if it returned at all, could always be dropped 
again at the shrine which had heard her first 
prayer. 

"It is Paris that I know best," she said, 
" and that I love always, but I am not born 
in it, nor none of mine. It is my father that 
desired much that we should gain more, and 
who is come here when I am so little that I 
can be carried on the back. He is a weaver, 
madame, a weaver of silk, and my mother 
knows silk also from the beginning. Why 
not, when it is to her mother who also has 
known it, and she winds cocoons, too, when 
she is little? I have played with them for the 
first plaything, and indeed the only one, 
madame, since, when I learn what they are 



A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 207 

and how one must use them, I have knowl- 
edge enough to hold the threads, and so begin. 
It was work, yes, but not the work of to-day. 
We worked together. If my father brought 
us here, it was that all things might be better ; 
for he loved us well. He sang as he wove, 
and we sang with him. If hands were tired, 
he said always : ' Think how you are earning 
for us all, and for the dot that some day you 
shall have when your blue eyes are older, and 
some one comes who will see that they are 
wise eyes that, if they laugh, know also all 
the ways that these threads must go.' That 
pleased me, for I was learning, too, and to- 
gether we earned well, and had our pot au feu 
and good wine and no lack of bread. 

" That was the hand-loom, and when at last 
is come another that goes with steam, the 
weavers have revolted and sworn to destroy 
them all, since one could do the work of 
many. I hear it all, and listen, and think 
how it is that a man's mind can think a thing 
that takes bread from other men. I am six- 
teen, then, and skilful and with good wages 
for every day, and it is then that Armand is 
come, — Armand, who was weaver, too, but who 



208 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

had been soldier with the great Emperor, and 
seen the girls of all countries. But he cared 
for none of them till he saw me, for his thought 
was always on his work ; and he, too, planned 
machines, and fretted that he had not educa- 
tion enough to make them with drawings and 
figures so that the masters would understand. 
When machines have come he has fretted 
more ; for one at least had been clear in his 
own thought, and now he cannot have it as 
he will, since another's thought has been before 
him. He told me all this, believing I could 
understand; and so I could, madame, since 
love made me wise enough to see what he 
might mean, and if I had not words, at least 
I had ears, and always I have used them well. 
We are still one family when the time comes 
that I marry, and my father has good wages 
in spite of machines, and all are reconciled to 
them, save my brother. But the owners build 
factories. It is no longer at home that one 
can work ; and in these the children go, yes, 
even little ones, and hours are longer, and 
there is no song to cheer them, and no mother 
who can speak sometimes or tell a tale as they 
wind, and all is different. And so my mother 



A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 209 

says always : ' It is not good for France that 
the loom is taken out of the houses ; ' and if 
she makes more money because of more silk, 
she loses things that are more precious than 
money, and it is all bad that it must be so. 
My father shakes his head. There are wages 
for every child ; and he sees this, and does 
not so well see that they earned also at 
home, and had some things that the factory 
stops, for always. 

"For me, I am weaver of ribbons, and I 
love them well, all the bright, beautiful colors. 
I look at the windows of my St. Etienne and 
feel the color like a song in my heart, and 
while I weave I see them always, and could 
even think that I spin them from my own 
mind. 

" That is a fancy that has rest when the 
days are long, and the sound of the mill in 
my ears, and the beat of the machines, that I 
feel sometimes are cruel, for one can never 
stop, but must go on always. I think in my- 
self, as I see the children, that I shall never 
let mine stand with them, and indeed there is 
no need, since we are all earning, and there is 
money saved, and this is all true for long. 

14 



210 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

The children are come. Three boys are mine; 
two with Armand's eyes, and one with mine, 
whom Armand loves best because of this, but 
seeks well to make no difference, and we call 
him Etienne for my saint and my church. 
And, madame, I think often that more heaven 
is in him than we often know, and perhaps 
because I have prayed always under the win- 
dow where the lights are all at last one glory, 
and the color itself is a prayer, Etienne is 
so born that he must have it, too. I take 
him there a baby, and he stretches his hands 
and smiles. He does not shout like the others, 
but his smile seems from heaven. He is an 
artist. He draws always with a bit of char- 
coal, with anything, and I think that he shall 
study, and, it may be, make other beautiful 
things that may live in a new St. Etienne, or 
in some other place in this Paris that I love ; 
and I am happy. 

"Then comes the time, madame, that one 
remembers and prays to forget, till one knows 
that it may be the good God's way of telling 
us how wrong we are and what we must learn. 
First it is Armand, who has become revolu- 
tionary, — what you call to-day communist, — 



A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 211 

and who is found in what are called plots, and 
tried and imprisoned. It was not for long. 
He would have come to me again, but the 
fever comes and kills many; he dies and I 
cannot be with him, — no, nor even see him 
when they take him to burial. I go in a 
dream. I will not believe it; and then my 
father is hurt. He is caught in one of those 
machines that my mother so hates, and his 
hand is gone and his arm crushed. 

" Now the children must earn. There is no 
other way. For Armand and Pierre I could 
bear it, since they are stronger, but for Eti- 
enne, no. He comes from school that he 
loves, and must take his place behind the 
loom. He is patient; he says, even, he is 
glad to earn for us all; but he is pale, and 
the light in his eyes grows dim, save when, 
night and morning, he kneels with me under 
my window and feels it as I do. 

" Then evil days are here, and always more 
and more evil. Month by month wages are 
less and food is more. My mother is dead, 
too, and my father quite helpless, and my 
brother that has never been quite as others, 
and so cannot earn. We work always. My 



212 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

boys know well all that must be known, but at 
seventeen Armand is tall and strong as a man, 
and he is taken for soldier, and he, too, never 
comes to us again. I work more and more, 
and if I earn two francs for the day am glad, 
but now Etienne is sick and I see well that he 
cannot escape. ' It is the country he needs,' 
says the doctor. 'He must be taken to the 
country if he is to live ; ' but these are words. 
I pray, — I pray always that succor may come, 
but it comes not, nor can I even be with him 
in his pain, since I must work always. And 
so it is, madame, that one day when I return, 
my father lies on his bed weeping, and the 
priest is there and looks with pity upon me, 
and my Etienne lies there still, and the smile 
that was his only is on his face. 

" That is all, madame. My life has ended 
there. But it goes on for others still and can. 
My father has lived till I too am almost old. 
My brother lives yet, and my boy, Pierre, 
who was shot at Balaklava, he has two chil- 
dren and his wife, who is couturiere, and I 
must aid them. I remain weaver, and I earn 
always the same. Wages stay as in the be- 
ginning, but all else is more and more. One 



A SILK-WEAVER OF PARIS. 213 

may live, but that is all. Many days we have 
only bread; sometimes not enough even of 
that. But the end comes. I have always my 
St. Etienne, and often under the window I see 
my Etienne's smile, and know well the good 
God has cared for him, and I need no more. 
I could wish only that the children might be 
saved, but I cannot tell. France needs them ; 
but I think well she needs them more as souls 
than as hands that earn wages, though truly 
I am old and it may be that I do not know 
what is best. Tell me, madame, must the 
children also work always with you, or do you 
care for other things than work, and is there 
time for one to live and grow as a plant in the 
sunshine ? That is what I wish for the chil- 
dren ; but Paris knows no such life, nor can 
it, since we must live, and so I must wait, 
and that is all." 



CHAPTER XIX. 



m THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC. 



" 1\T ®> madame, unless one has genius or 
^ ^ much money in the beginning, it is 
only possible to live, and sometimes one be- 
lieves that it is not living. If it were not 
that all in Paris is so beautiful, how would I 
have borne much that I have known? But 
always, when even the hunger has been most 
sharp, has been the sky so blue and clear, and 
the sun shining down on the beautiful boule- 
vards, and all so bright, so gay, why should I 
show a face of sorrow ? 

" I have seen the war, it is true. I have 
known almost the starving, for in those days 
all go hungry; most of all, those who have 
little to buy with. But one bears the hunger 
better when one has been born to it, and that 
is what has been for me. 

" In the Rue Jeanne d' Arc we are all hun- 



IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC. 215 

gry, and it is as true to-day, yes, more true, 
than in the days when I was young. The char- 
itable, who give more and more each year in 
Paris, will not believe there is such a quarter, 
but for us, we know. Have you seen the Rue 
Jeanne d'Arc, madame ? Do you know what 
can be for this Paris that is so fair ? " 

This question came in the square before old 
Notre Dame, still the church of the poor, its 
gray towers and carved portals dearer to them 
than to the Paris which counts the Madeleine 
a far better possession than this noblest of all 
French cathedrals. Save for such reminder 
this quarter might have remained unvisited, 
since even philanthropic Paris appears to have 
little or no knowledge of it, and it is far be- 
yond the distance to which the most curious 
tourist is likely to penetrate. 

On by the Halle aux Vins, with its stifling, 
fermenting, alcoholic odors, and then by the 
Jardin des Plantes, and beyond, the blank walls 
of many manufactories stretching along the 
Seine, — this for one shore. On the othet lies 
La Rapee, with the windows of innumerable 
wine shops flaming in the sun, and further on, 
Bercy, the ship bank of the river, covered 



216 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

with wine -casks and a throng of drays and 
draymen ; of dehardears, whose business it is 
to unload wood or to break up old boats into 
material for kindling ; and of the host whose 
business is on and about the river. 

They are of the same order as the London 
Dock laborers, and, like the majority of this 
class there and here, know every extremity of 
want. But it is a pretty picture from which 
one turns from the right, passing up the noisy 
boulevard of the Gare d'Orleans, toward the 
quarter of the Gobelins. This quarter has its 
independent name and place like the " City 
of the Sun." Like that it knows every depth 
of poverty, but, unlike that, sunshine and 
space are quite unknown. The buildings are 
piled together, great masses separated by 
blind alleys, some fifteen hundred lodgings in 
all, and the owner of many of them is a 
prominent philanthropist, whose name heads 
the list of directors for various charitable in- 
stitutions, but whose feet, we must believe, 
can hardly be acquainted with those alleys 
and stairways, narrow, dark, and foul. The 
unpaved ways show gaping holes in which 
the greasy mud lies thick or mingles with the 



IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC. 217 

pools of standing water, fed from every house 
and fermenting with rottenness. 

The sidewalks, once asphalted, are cracked 
in long seams and holes, where the same 
water does its work, and where hideous ex- 
halations poison the air. Within it is still 
worse ; filth trickles down the walls and min- 
gles under foot, the corridors seeming rather 
sewers than passages for human beings, while 
the cellars are simply reservoirs for the same 
deposits. Above in the narrow rooms huddle 
the dwellers in those lodgings ; whole families 
in one room, its single window looking on a 
dark court where one sees swarms of half- 
naked children, massed together like so many 
maggots, their flabby flesh a dirty white, their 
faces prematurely aged and with a diabolical 
intelligence in their sharp eyes. The children 
are always old. The old have reached the 
extremity of hideous decrepitude. One would 
say that these veins had never held healthy 
human blood, and that for young and old pus 
had become its substitute. To these homes 
return many of the men who wait for work 
on the quays, and thus this population, born 
to crime and every foulness that human life 



218 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

can know, has its proportion also of honest 
workers, whose fortunes have ebbed till they 
have been left stranded in this slime, of a 
quality so tenacious that escape seems impos- 
sible. Many of the lodgings are unoccupied, 
and at night they become simply dens of wild 
beasts, — men and boys who live by petty 
thieving climbing the walls, stealing along the 
passages and up the dark stairways, and 
sheltering themselves in every niche and 
corner. Now and then, when the outrages 
become too evident, the police descend sud- 
denly on the drinking, shouting tenants at 
will, and for a day or two there is peace 
for the rest. 

But the quarter is shut in and hedged 
about by streets of a general respectable ap- 
pearance, and thus it is felt to be impossible 
that such a spot can exist. It is, however, 
the breeding-ground of criminals ; and each 
year swells the quota, whose lives can have 
but one ending, and who cost the city in the 
end many times the amount that in the be- 
ginning would have insured decent homes 
and training in an industrial school. 

It is only the dregs of humanity that re- 



IN THE RUE JEANNE PARC. 219 

main in such quarters. The better elements, 
unless compelled by starvation, flee from it, 
though with the tenacity of the Parisian for 
his own quartier, they settle near it still. 
All about are strange trades, invented often 
by the followers of them, and unknown out- 
side a country which has learned every 
method of not only turning an honest penny, 
but doing it in the most effective way. 
Among them all not one can be stranger 
than that adopted by Madame Agathe, whose 
soft voice and plaintive intonations are in 
sharpest contrast with her huge proportions, 
and who began life as one of the great army 
of couturieres. 

With failing eyesight and the terror of 
starvation upon her, she went one Sunday, 
with her last two francs in her pocket, to 
share them with a sick cousin, who had been 
one of the workmen at the Jardin des 
Plantes. He, too, was in despair; for an 
accident had taken from him the use of his 
right arm, and there were two children who 
must be fed. 

" What to do ! what to do ! " he cried ; and 
then, as he saw the tears running down Ma- 



220 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

dame Agathe's cheeks, he in turn, with the 
ease of his nation, wept also. 

"That is what has determined me/' said 
Madame Agathe, as not long ago she told of 
the day when she had given up hope. 
" Tears are for women, and even for them it 
is not well to shed many. I say to myself, 
' I am on the earth : the good God wills it. 
There must be something that I may do, and 
that will help these even more helpless ones/ 
And as I say it there comes in from the Jardln 
des Plantes a man who has been a companion 
to Pierre, and who, as he sees him so despair- 
ing, first embraces him and then tells him 
this: ' Pierre, it is true you cannot again 
hold spade or hoe, but here is something. 
There are never enough ants' eggs for the 
zoological gardens and for those that feed 
pheasants. I know already one woman who 
supplies them, and she will some day be rich. 
Why not you also ? ' 

"'I have no hands for any work. This 
hand is useless/ said Pierre ; and then I 
spoke : i But mine are here and are strong ; 
you have eyes, which for me are well nigh 
gone. It shall be your eyes and my hands 



IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC. 221 

that will do this work if I may learn all the 
ways. It is only that ants have teeth and 
bite and we must fear that. 5 

" Then Claude has laughed. ' Teeth ! yes, 
if you will, but they do not gnaw like hunger. 
Come with me, Madame Agathe, and we will 
talk with her of whom I speak, — she who 
knows it all and has the good heart and will 
tell and help.' 

" That is how I begun, madame. It is 
Blanche who has taught me, and I have lived 
with her a month and watched all her ways, 
and learned all that these ants can do. At 
first one must renounce thought to be any- 
thing but bitten, yes, bitten always. See me, 
I am tanned as leather. It is the skin of an 
apple that has dried that you see on me and 
with her it is the same. We wear pantaloons 
and gauntlets of leather. It is almost a coat 
of mail, but close it as one may, they are 
always underneath. She can sleep when hun- 
dreds run on her, but I, I am frantic at first 
till I am bitten everywhere ; and then, at last, 
as with bee-keepers, I can be poisoned no 
longer, and they may gnaw as they will. 
They are very lively. They love the heat. 



222 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

and we must keep up great heat always and 
feed them very high, and then they lay many 
eggs, which we gather for the bird-breeders 
and others who want them. Twice we have 
been forced to move, since our ants will 
wander, and the neighbors complain when 
their pantries are full, and justly. 

" Now eight and even ten sacks of ants come 
to me from Germany and many places. I am 
busy always, and there is money enough for 
all; but I have sent the children away, for 
they are girls, and for each I save a little dot, 
and I will not have them know this metier, and 
be so bitten that they, too, are tanned like 
me and have never more their pretty fresh 
skins. Near us now, madame, is another 
woman, but her trade is less good than mine. 
She is a bait-breeder, 'line eleveure des asti- 
cots. J All about her room hang old stock- 
ings. In them she puts bran and flour and 
bits of cork, and soon the red worms show 
themselves, and once there she has no more 
thought than to let them grow and to sell 
them for eight and sometimes ten sous a hun- 
dred. But I like better my ants, which are 
clean, and which, if they run everywhere, do 



IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC. 223 

not wriggle nor squirm nor make you think 
always of corruption and death. She breeds 
other worms for the fishermen, who buy them 
at the shops for fishing tackle ; but often she 
also buys worms from others and feeds them 
a little time till plump, but I find them even 
more disgusting. 

" An ant has so much intelligence. I can 
watch mine, madame, as if they were people 
almost, and would even believe they know 
me. But that does not hinder them from 
biting me ; no, never ; and because they are 
always upon me the neighbors and all who 
know me have chosen to call me the ' sister- 
in-law of ants/ 

"It is not a trade for women, it is true, 
save for one only here and there. But it is 
better than sewing; yes, far better; and I 
wish all women might have something as 
good, since now I prosper when once I ate 
only bread. What shall be done, madame, to 
make it that more than bread becomes pos- 
sible for these workers ? " 



CHAPTER XX. 

FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 

TN Paris, its fulness of brilliant life so 
dominates that all shadows seem to fly 
before it and poverty and pain to have no 
place, and the same feeling holds for the chief 
cities of the continent. It is Paris that is the 
key-note of social life, and in less degree its 
influence makes itself felt even at remote dis- 
tances, governing production and fixing the 
rate of wages paid. Modern improvement 
has swept away slums, and it is only here and 
there, in cities like Berlin or Vienna, that one 
comes upon anything which deserves the 
name. 

The Ghetto is still a part of Rome, and 
likely to remain so, since the conservatism of 
the lowest order is stronger even in the 
Italian than in the French or German 
worker. 



FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 225 

But if civilization does not abolish the 
effects of low wages and interminable hours 
of labor, it at least removes them from sight, 
and having made its avenues through what 
once were dens, is certain that all dens are 
done away with. The fact that the avenue is 
made, that sunshine enters dark courts and 
noisome alleys, and that often court and alley 
are swept away absolutely, is a step gained ; 
yet, as is true of Shaftesbury Avenue in Lon- 
don cut through the old quarters of St. Giles, 
the squalor and misery is condensed instead 
of destroyed, and the building that held one 
hundred holds now double or triple that 
number. For Paris the Rue Jeanne d'Arc 
already described is an illustration of what 
may lie within a stone's throw of quiet and 
reputable streets, and of what chances await 
the worker, whose scanty wages offer only 
existence, and for whom the laying up of any 
fund for old age is an impossibility. 

The chief misfortune, however, and one 
mourned by the few French political econo- 
mists who have looked below the surface, is 
the gradual disappearance of family life and 
its absorption into that of the factory. 

15 



226 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

With this absorption has come other vices, 
that follow where the family has no further 
place, and, recognizing this at last, the heads 
of various great manufactories — notably in 
Lyons and other points where the silk indus- 
try centres - — have sought to reorganize labor 
as much as possible on the family basis. In 
the old days, when the loom was a part of the 
furniture of every home, the various phases 
of weaving were learned one by one, and the 
child who began by filling bobbins, passed on 
gradually to the mastery of every branch in- 
volved, and became judge of qualities as well 
as maker of quantities. In this phase, if hours 
were long, there were at least the breaks of 
the ordinary family life, — the care of details 
taken by each in turn, and thus a knowledge 
acquired, which, with the development of the 
factory system on its earliest basis, was quite 
impossible. There were other alleviations, 
too, as the store of songs and of traditions 
testifies, both these possibilities ceasing when 
home labor was transferred to the factory. 

On the other hand, there were certain com- 
pensations, in the fixing of a definite number 
of hours, of the rate of wages, and at first in 



FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 227 

freeing the home from the workshop element, 
the loom having usurped the largest and best 
place in every household. But, as machinery 
developed, the time of mother and children 
was again absorbed, and so absolutely that 
any household knowledge ended then and 
there, with no further possibility of its acqui- 
sition. It was this state of things, with its 
accumulated results, which, a generation or 
so later, faced the few investigators who puz- 
zled over the decadence of morals, the en- 
feebled physiques, the general helplessness of 
the young women who married, and the whole 
series of natural consequences. So startling 
were the facts developed, that it became at 
once evident that a change must be brought 
about, if only as a measure of wise political 
economy ; and thus it has happened for Lyons 
that the factory system has perfected itself, 
and matches or even goes beyond that of any 
other country with the exception of isolated 
points like Saltaire in England, or the Chen- 
ney village in Connecticut. When it became 
evident that the ordinary factory girl-worker 
at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, 
or make a broth, or care for a child's needs so 



228 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

well as the brute, the time for action had come ; 
and schools of various orders, industrial and 
otherwise, have gradually risen and sought to 
undo the work of the years that made them 
necessary. Perfect in many points as the sys- 
tem has become, however, competition has so 
followed and pressed upon the manufacturer 
that the wage standard has lowered to little 
more than subsistence point, this fact including 
all forms of woman's work, without the factory 
as well as within. 

Leaving Prance and Germany and looking 
at Swiss and Italian workers, much the same 
statements may be made, the lace-workers in 
Switzerland, for instance, being an illustration 
of the very minimum of result for human 
labor. Like the lace-workers of Germany, the 
fabric must often grow in the dark almost, 
basements being chosen that dampness may 
make the thread follow more perfectly the 
will of the w r orker, whose day is never less 
than fifteen hours long, whose food seldom 
goes beyond black bread with occasional milk 
or cabbage soup, and whose average of life 
seldom exceeds forty years. There is not a 
thread in the exquisite designs that has not 



FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 229 

been spun from a human nerve stretched to 
its utmost tension, and the face of these 
workers once seen are a shadow forever on 
the lovely webs that every woman covets 
instinctively. 

Why an industry demanding so many deli- 
cate qualities- — patience, perfection of touch, 
and long practice — should represent a return 
barely removed from starvation, no man has 
told us ; but so the facts are, and so they stand 
for every country of Europe where the work 
is known. In Germany and Italy alike, the 
sewing-machine has found its way even to the 
remotest village, manufacturers in the large 
towns finding it often for their interest to send 
their work to points where the lowest rate 
possible in cities seems to the simple people 
far beyond what they would dream of asking. 
It is neither in attic nor basement that the 
Italian worker runs her machine, but in the 
open doorway, or even the street itself, sun- 
shine pouring upon her, neighbors chatting in 
the pauses for basting or other preparation, 
and the sense of human companionship and 
interest never for an instant lost. For the 
Anglo-Saxon such methods are alien to every 



230 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

instinct. For the Italian they are as natural 
as the reverse would be unnatural ; and thus, 
even with actual w r age conditions at the worst, 
the privations and suffering, which are as in- 
evitable for one as the other, are made bear- 
able; and even sink out of sight almost. They 
are very tangible facts, but they have had to 
mean something very near starvation before 
the Italian turned his face toward America, — - 
the one point where, it is still believed, the 
worker can escape such fear. 

It is hard for the searcher into these places 
to realize that suffering in any form can have 
place under such sunshine, or with the appar- 
ent joyousness of Italian life; and it is certain 
that this life holds a compensation unknown 
to the North. 

In Genoa, late in May, I paused in one of 
the old streets leading up from the quays, 
where hundreds of sailors daily come and go, 
and where one of the chief industries for 
women is the making of various forms of sailor 
garments. Every doorway opening on the 
street held its sewing-machine or the low 
table w T here cutters and basters were at work, 
fingers and tongues flying in concert, and a 



FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 231 

babel of happy sound issuing between the 
grand old walls of houses seven and eight 
stories high, flowers in every window, many- 
colored garments waving from lines stretched 
across the front, and, far above, a proud mother 
handing her bambino across for examination by 
her opposite neighbor, a very simple operation 
where streets are but four or five feet wide. 

Life here is reduced to its simplest elements. 
Abstemious to a degree impossible in a more 
northern climate, the Italian worker in town 
or village demands little beyond macaroni, 
polenta, or chestnuts, with oil or soup, and 
wine as the occasional luxury ; and thus a 
woman who works fourteen or even fifteen 
hours a day for a lire and a half, and at times 
only a lire (20c), still has enough for absolute 
needs, and barely looks beyond. 

It is only when the little bundle has ceased 
to be bambino that she thinks of a larger life 
as possible, or wonders why women who work 
more hours than men, and often do a man's 
labor, are paid only half the men's rate. 

In Eome, where these lines are written, the 
story is the same. There are few statistics 
from which one can glean any definite idea of 



232 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

numbers, or even of occupations. The army 
swallows all the young men, precisely as in 
France ; but women slip less readily into re- 
sponsible positions, and thus earn in less degree 
than in either France or Germany. 

In the Ghetto swarm the crowds that have 
filled it for hundreds of years, and its narrow 
ways hold every trade known to man's hands, 
as well as every form of drudgery which here 
reaches its climax. 

The church has decreed the relieving of 
poverty as one chief method of saving rich 
men's souls, and thus the few attempts made 
by the English colony to bring about some 
reconstruction of methods as well as thought 
have met with every possible opposition, till, 
within recent years, the necessity of industrial 
education has become apparent, and Italy has 
inaugurated some of the best work in this 
direction. Beyond Italy there has been no 
attempt at experiment. The work at best 
has been chiefly from the outside; but whether 
in this form, or assisted by actual statistics or 
the general investigation of others, the con- 
clusion is always the same, and sums up as 
the demand for every worker and every mas- 



FROM FRANCE TO ITALY. 233 

ter the resurrection of the old ideal of work ; 
the doing away of competition as it at present 
rules, and the substitution of co-operation, 
productive as well as distributive; industrial 
education for every child, rich or poor ; and 
that and recognition of the interests of all as 
a portion of our personal charge and responsi- 
bility, which, if I name it Socialism, will be 
scouted as a dream of an impossible future, 
but which none the less bears that name in 
its highest interpretation, and is the one 
solution for every problem on either side the 
great sea, between the eastern and western 
worker. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 



A T the first glance, and even when longer 
^-^ survey has been made, both Paris and 
Berlin, — - and these may stand as the repre- 
sentative Continental cities, — seem to offer 
every possible facility for the work of women. 
Everywhere, behind counter, in shop or cafe, 
in the markets, on the streets, wherever it is 
a question of any phase of the ordinary busi- 
ness of life, women are in the ascendant, and 
would seem to have conquered for themselves 
a larger place and better opportunities than 
either England or America have to show. 
But, as investigation goes on, this larger em- 
ployment makes itself evident as obstacle 
rather than help to the better forms of work, 
and the woman's shoulders bear not only her 
natural burden, but that also belonging to the 
man. The army lays its hand on the boy at 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 235 

sixteen or seventeen. The companies and 
regiments perpetually moving from point to 
point in Paris seem to be composed chiefly of 
boys ; every student is enrolled, and the pe- 
riod of service must always be deducted in 
any plan for life made by the family. 

Naturally, then, these gaps are filled by 
women, — not only in all ordinary avocations, 
but in the trades which are equally affected 
by this perpetual drain. In every town of 
France or Germany where manufacturing is 
of old or present date, the story is the same, 
and women are the chief workers; but, in 
spite of this fact, the same inequalities in 
wages prevail that are found in England and 
America, while conditions include every form 
of the sharpest privation. 

For England and America as well is the fact 
that law regulates or seeks to regulate every 
detail, no matter how minute, and that the 
manufacturer or artisan of any description is 
subject to such laws. On the continent, save 
where gross wrongs have brought about some 
slight attempt at regulation by the State, the 
law is merely a matter of general principles, 
legislation simply indicating certain ends to be 



236 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

accomplished, but leaving the means entirely 
in the hands of the heads of industries. Ger- 
many has a far more clearly defined code than 
France ; but legislation, while it has touched 
upon child labor, has neglected that of women- 
workers entirely. Within a year or two the 
report of the Belgian commissioners has shown 
a state of things in the coal mines, pictured 
with tremendous power by Zola in his novel 
" Germinal," but in no sense a new story, 
since the conditions of Belgian workers are 
practically identical with those of women- 
workers in Silesia, or at any or all of the 
points on the continent where women are 
employed. Philanthropists have cried out; 
political economists have shown the suicidal 
nature of non-interference, and demonstrated 
that if the State gains to-day a slight sur- 
plus in her treasury, she has, on the other 
hand, lost something for which no money 
equivalent can be given, and that the women 
who labor from twelve to sixteen hours in the 
mines, or at any industry equally confining, 
have no power left to shape the coming gen- 
erations into men, but leave to the State an 
inheritance of weak-bodied and often weak- 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 237 

minded successors to the same toil. For 
France and Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, 
at every point where women are employed, 
the story is the same ; and the fact remains 
that, while in the better order of trades women 
may prosper, in the large proportion, constant 
and exhausting labor simply keeps off actual 
starvation, but has no margin for anything 
that can really be called living. 

For Paris and Berlin, but in greater degree 
for Paris, a fact holds true which has almost 
equal place for New York. Women-workers, 
whose only support is the needle, contend 
with an army of women for whom such work 
is not a support, but who follow it as a means 
of increasing an already certain income. For 
these women there is no pressing necessity, 
and in Paris they are of the bourgeoisie, whose 
desires are always a little beyond their means, 
who have ungratified caprices, ardent wishes 
to shine like women in the rank above them, 
to dress, and to fascinate. They are the wives 
and daughters of petty clerks, or employes of 
one order and another, of small government 
functionaries and the like, who embroider or 
sew three or four hours a day, and sell the 



238 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

work for what it will bring. The money 
swells the housekeeping fund, gives a dinner 
perhaps, or aids in buying a shawl, or some 
coveted and otherwise unattainable bit of 
jewelry. The work is done secretly, since 
they have not the simplicity either of the 
real ouvriere or of the grande darne, both of 
whom sew openly, the one for charity, the 
other for a living. But this middle class, 
despising the worker and aspiring always to- 
ward the luxurious side of life, feels that em- 
broidery or tapestry of some description is 
the only suitable thing for their fingers, and 
busy on this, preserve the appearance of the 
dignity they covet. Often their yearly gains 
are not more than one hundred francs, and they 
seldom exceed two hundred ; for they accept 
whatever is offered them, and the merchants 
who deal with them know that they submit 
to any extortion so long as their secret is kept. 
This class is one of the obstacles in the way 
of the ordinary worker, and one that grows 
more numerous with every year of the grow- 
ing love of luxury. There must be added to it 
another, — and in Paris it is a very large one, 
— that of women who have known better days, 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 239 

who are determined to keep up appearances 
and to hide their misery absolutely from for- 
mer friends. They are timid to excess, and 
spend days of labor on a piece of work which, 
in the end, brings them hardly more than a 
morsel of bread. One who goes below the 
surface of Paris industries is amazed to dis- 
cover how large a proportion of women- work- 
ers come under this head ; and their numbers 
have been one of the strongest arguments for 
industrial education, and some development 
of the sense of what value lies in good w r ork 
of any order. In one industry alone, — that of 
bonnet-making in general, it was found a year 
or two since that over eight hundred women 
of this order were at work secretly, and though 
they are found in several other industries, 
embroidery is their chief source of income. 
Thus they are in one sense a combination 
against other women, and one more reason 
given by merchants of every order for the 
unequal pay of men and women. It is only 
another confirmation of the fact that, so long 
as women are practically arrayed against 
women, any adjustment of the questions in- 
volved in all work is impossible. Hours, 



240 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

wages, all the points at issue that make up 
the sum of wrong represented by many phases 
of modern industry, wait for the organization 
among women themselves ; and such organiza- 
tion is impossible till the sense of kinship and 
mutual obligation has been born. With com- 
petition as the heart of every industry, men 
are driven apart by a force as inevitable and 
irresistible as its counterpart in the material 
world, and it is only when an experiment like 
that of Guise has succeeded, and the patient 
work and waiting of Pere Godin borne fruit 
that all men pronounce good, that we know 
what possibilities lie in industrial co-operation. 
Such co-operation as has there proved itself 
not only possible but profitable for every 
member concerned, comes at last, to one who 
has faced women-workers in every trade they 
count their own, and under every phase of 
want and misery, born of ignorance first, and 
then of the essential conditions of competi- 
tion, under-pay, and over-work, as one great 
hope for the future. The instant demand, if 
it is to become possible, is for an education 
sufficiently technical to give each member of 
society the hand-skill necessary to make a fair 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 241 

livelihood. Such knowledge is impossible 
without perfectly equipped industrial schools ; 
and the need of these has so demonstrated 
itself that further argument for their adoption 
is hardly necessary. The constant advance in 
invention and the fact that the worker, unless 
exceptionally skilled, is more and more the 
servant of machinery, is an appeal no less 
powerful in the same direction. Twenty 
years ago one of the wisest thinkers in 
France, conservative, yet with the clearest 
sense of what the future must bring for all 
w r orkers, wrote : — 

" From the economic point of view, woman, who 
has next to no material force and whose arms are 
advantageously replaced by the least machine, can 
have useful place and obtain fair remuneration only 
by the development of the best qualities of her 
intelligence. It is the inexorable law of our civili- 
zation — the principle and formula even of social 
progress, that mechanical engines are to accomplish 
every operation of human labor which does not pro- 
ceed directly from the mind. The hand of man is 
each day deprived of a portion of its original task, 
but this general gain is a loss for the particular, and 
for the classes whose only instrument of labor and 
of earning daily bread is a pair of feeble arms." 



242 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

The machine, the synonym for production 
at large, has refined and subtilized — even 
spiritualized itself to a degree almost incon- 
ceivable, nor is there any doubt but that 
the future has far greater surprises in store. 
But if metal has come to wellnigh its utmost 
power of service, the worker's capacity has 
had no equality of development, and the story 
of labor to-day for the whole working world 
is one of degradation. That men are becom- 
ing alive to this ; that students of political 
economy solemnly warn the producer what 
responsibility is his ; and that the certainty of 
some instant step as vital and inevitable 
is plain, — are gleams of light in this 
murky and sombre sky, from which it would 
seem at times only the thunderbolt could be 
certain. 

Organization and its result in industrial co- 
operation is one goal, but even this must 
count in the end only as corrective and palli- 
ative unless with it are associated other re- 
forms which this generation is hardly likely 
to see, yet which more and more outline 
themselves as a part of those better clays for 
which we work and hope. As to ximerica thus 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 243 

far, our great spaces, our sense of unlimited 
opportunity, of the chance for all which we 
still count as the portion of every one on 
American soil, and a hundred other standard 
and little-questioned beliefs, have all seemed 
testimony to the reality and certainty of our 
faith. But as one faces the same or worse 
industrial conditions in London or any great 
city, English or Continental, with its conges- 
tion of labor and its mass of resultant misery, 
the same solution suggests itself and the 
cry comes from philanthropist and Philistine 
alike, " Send them into the country ! Give 
them homes and work there ! " 

Naturally this would seem the answer ; but 
where ? For when search is made for any 
bit of land on which a home may rise and 
food be given back from the soil, all England 
is found to be in the hands of a few thousand 
land-owners, while London itself practically 
belongs to less than a dozen, with rents at 
such rates that when paid no living wage re- 
mains. When once this land question is 
touched, it is found made up of immemorial in- 
justices, absurdities, outrages, and for America 
no less than for the whole world of workers. 



244 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

It cannot be that man has right to air and 
sunshine, but never right to the earth under 
his feet. Standing-place there must be for 
this long battle for existence, and in yielding 
this standing-place comes instant solution of a 
myriad problems. 

This is no place for extended argument as 
to the necessity of land nationalization, or the 
advantages or disadvantages of Mr. George's 
scheme of a single tax on land values, with 
the consequent dropping of our whole com- 
plicated tariff. But believing that the experi- 
ment is at least worth trying, and trying 
patiently and thoroughly, the belief, slowly 
made plain and protested against till further 
protest became senseless and impossible, 
stands here, as one more phase of work to be 
done. In it are bound up many of the re- 
forms, without which the mere fact of granted 
standing-room would be valueless. The day 
must come when no one can question that the 
natural opportunities of life can never right- 
fully be monopolized by individuals, and 
when the education that fits for earning, and 
the means of earning are under wise control, 
monopolies, combinations, " trusts," — all the 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 245 

facts which represent organized injustice sink 
once for all to their own place. 

Differ as we may, then, regarding methods 
and possibilities, one question rises always for 
every soul alike, — What part have I in this 
awakening, and what work with hands or 
head can I do to speed this time to which all 
men are born, and of which to-day they know 
only the promise ? From lowest to highest, 
the material side has so dominated that other 
needs have slipped out of sight ; and to-day, 
often, the hands that follow the machine in 
its , almost human operations, are less human 
than it. Matter is God, and for scientist and 
speculative philosopher, and too often for so- 
cial reformer also, the place and need of 
another God ceases, and there is no hope 
for the toiler but to lie down at last in the 
dust and find it sweet to him. Yet for him, 
and for each child of man, is something as 
certain. Not the God of theology ; not the God 
made the fetich and blindly worshipped ; but 
the Power whose essence is love and inward 
constraint to righteousness, and to whom all 
men must one day come, no matter through 
w r hat dark w r ays or with what stumbling feet. 



246 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

The vision is plain and clear of what the 
State must one day mean and what the work 
of the world must be, when once more the 
devil of self-seeking and greed flees to his 
own place, and each man knows that his life 
is his own only as he gives it to high service, 
and to loving thought for every weaker soul. 
The co-operative commonwealth must come ; 
and when it has come, all men will know that 
it is but the vision of every age in which 
high souls have seen what future is for every 
child of man, and have known that when the 
spirit of brotherhood rules once for all, the 
city of God has in very truth descended 
from the heavens, and men at last have found 
their own inheritance. 

This is the future, remote even when most 
ardently desired ; impossible, unless with the 
dream is bound up the act that brings realiza- 
tion. And when the nature and method of 
such act comes as question, and the w r ord is, 
What can be done to-day, in the hour that 
now is? — how shall unlearned, unthinking 
minds bend themselves to these problems, 
when the wisest have failed, and the world 
still struggles in bondage to custom, the accu- 



PRESENT AND FUTURE. 247 

mulated force of long-tolerated wrong — what 
can the answer be ? 

There is no enlightener like even the sim- 
plest act of real justice. It is impossible that 
the most limited mind should not feel expan- 
sion and know illumination in even the effort 
to comprehend what justice actually is and 
involves. Instantly when its demand is heard 
and met, custom, tradition, old beliefs, every- 
thing that hampers progress, slip away, and 
actual values show themselves. The first step 
taken in such direction means always a second. 
It is the beginning of the real march onward ; 
the ending of any blind drifting in the mass, 
with no consciousness of individual power to 
move. 

A deep conviction founded on eternal law 
is itself an education, and whoever has once 
determined what the personal demand in life 
is, has entered the wicket-gate and sees before 
him a plain public road, on which all humanity 
may journey to the end. 

Here then lies the answer, no less than in 
these last words, the ending of one phase 
of work which still has only begun. For 
the day is coming when every child born 



248 PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD. 

will be taught the meaning of wealth, of capi- 
tal, of labor. Then there will be small need 
of any further schools of political economy, 
since wealth will be known to be only what 
the soul can earn, — that which adheres and 
passes on with it ; and capital, all forces that 
the commonwealth can use to make the man 
develop to his utmost possibility every power 
of soul and body ; and labor, the joyful, vol- 
untary acceptance of all work to this end, 
whether with hands or head. Till then, in 
the fearless and faithful acceptance of every 
consequence of a conviction, in personal con- 
secration to the highest demand, in increasing; 
effort to make happiness the portion of all, lies 
the task set for each one, — the securing to 
every soul the natural opportunity denied by 
the whole industrial system, both of land and 
labor, as it stands to-day. This is the goal 
for all ; and by whatever path it is reached, 
to each and every walker in it, good cheer 
and unflagging courage, and a leaving the 
way smoother for feet that will follow, till all 
paths are at last made plain, and every face 
set toward the city we seek ! 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 



PRISONERS OF POVERTY. 

WOMEN WAGE-WORKERS : THEIR TRADES AND 
THEIR LIVES. 



By HELEN CAMPBELL, 

'HE WHAT-TO-DO CLUB," " MRS. HERNDON'S II 
melinda's OPPORTUNITY," ETC. 

i6mo. Cloth. $1.00. Paper, 50 cents. 



AUTHOR OF "THE WHAT-TO-DO CLUB," " MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," 
MELINDA'S OPPORTUNITY," ETC. 



The author writes earnestly and warmly, but without prejudice, and her volume 
is an eloquent plea for the amelioration of the evils with which she deals. In the 
present importance into which the labor question generally has loomed, this vol- 
ume is a timely and valuable contribution to its literature, and merits wide read- 
ing and careful thought. — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

She has given us a most effective picture of the condition of New York working- 
women, because she has brought to the study of the subject not only great care 
but uncommon aptitude. She has made a close personal investigation, extending 
apparently over a long time ; she has had the penetration to search many queer 
and dark corners which are not often thought of by similar explorers ; and we 
suspect that, unlike too many philanthropists, she has the faculty of winning con- 
fidence and extracting the truth. She is sympathetic, but not a sentimentalist ; 
she appreciates exactness in facts and figures ; she can see both sides of a ques- 
tion, and she has abundant common sense. — New York Tribune. 

Helen Campbell's "Prisoners of Poverty" is a striking example of the trite 
phrase that " truth is stranger than fiction." It is a series of pictures of the lives 
of women wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and 
observation. No work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, 
indeed, if they occurred in a novel would at once be stamped as a figment of the 
brain. . . . Altogether, Mrs. Campbell's book is a notable contribution to the labor 
literature of the day, and will undoubtedly enlist sympathy for the cause of the op- 
pressed working- women whose stones do their own pleading. — ■ Springfield Union. 

It is good to see a new book by Helen Campbell. She has written several 
for the cause of working- women, and now comes her latest and best work, called 
" Prisoners of Poverty," on women wage-workers and their lives. It is compiled 
from a series of papers written for the Sunday edition of a New York paper. The 
author is well qualified to write on these topics, having personally investigated the 
horrible situation of a vast army of working- worn en in New York, — a reflection of 
the same conditions that exist in all large cities. 

It is glad tidings to hear that at last a voice is raised for the woman side of these 
great labor questions that are seething below the surface calm of society. And it 
is well that one so eloquent and sympathetic as Helen Campbell has spoken in be- 
half of the victims and against the horrors, the injustices, and the crimes that have 
forced them into conditions of living — if it can be called living — that are worse than 
death. It is painful to read of these terrors that exist so near our doors, but none 
the less necessary, for no person of mind or heart can thrust this knowledge aside. 
It is the first step towards a solution of the labor complications, some of which 
have assumed foul shapes and colossal proportions, through ignorance, weakness, 
and wickedness. — Hartford Times. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on 7'eceipt of 
price, by the publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 

Miss Melinda's Opportunity. 

A STORY. 

By HELEN CAMPBELL, 

AUTHOR OF "THE WHAT-TO-DO CLUB," "MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," 
" PRISONERS OF POVERTY." 

i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



" Mrs. Helen Campbell has written ' Miss Melinda's Opportunity ' with a 
definite purpose in view, and this purpose will reveal itself to the eyes of all of its 
philanthropic readers. The true aim of the story is to make life more real and 
pleasant to the young girls who spend the greater part of the day toiling in the 
busy stores of New York. Just as in the ' What-to-do Club ' the social level of 
village life was lifted several grades higher, so are the little friendly circles of shop- 
girls made to enlarge and form clubs in 'Miss Melinda's Opportunity.'" — 
Boston Herald. 

" * Miss Melinda's Opportunity,' a story by Helen Campbell, is in a some- 
what lighter vein than are the earlier books of thre clever author ; but it is none 
the less interesting and none the less realistic. The plot is unpretentious, and 
deals with the simplest and most conventional of themes ; but the character- 
drawing is uncommonly strong, especially that of Miss Melinda, which is a re- 
markably vigorous and interesting transcript from real life, and highly finished to 
the slightest details. There is much quiet humor in the book, and it is handled 
with skill and reserve. Those who have been attracted to Mrs. Campbell's other 
works will welcome the latest of them with pleasure and satisfaction." — Satur- 
day Gazette. 

" The best book that Helen Campbell has yet produced is her latest story, 
' Miss Melinda's Opportunity,' which is especially strong in character-drawing, 
and its life sketches are realistic and full of vigor, with a rich vein of humor run- 
ning through them. Miss Melinda is a dear lady of middle life, who has finally 
found her opportunity to do a great amount of good with her ample pecuniary 
means by helping those who have the disposition to help themselves. The story 
of how some bright and energetic girls who had gone to New York to earn their 
living put a portion of their earnings into a common treasury, and provided them- 
selves with a comfortable home and good fare for a very small sum per week, is 
not only of lively interest, but furnishes hints for other girls in similar circum- 
stances that may prove of great value. An unpretentious but well-sustained plot 
runs through the book, with a happy ending, in which Miss Melinda figures as 
the angel that she is." — Hotrte Journal. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
price, by the publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications, 

MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME. 

A NOVEL. 

By HELEN CAMPBELL. 

AUTHOR OF " THE WHAT-TO-DO CLUB." 

One volume. i6mo. Cloth. $1.50. 



" Confirmed novel-readers who have regarded fiction as created for amusement 
and luxury alone, lay down this book with a new and serious purpose in life. The 
social scientist reads it, and finds the solution of many a tangled problem ; the 
philanthropist finds in it direction and counsel. A novel written with a purpose, 
of which never for an instant does the author lose sight, it is yet absorbing in its 
interest. It reveals the narrow motives and the intrinsic selfishness of certain 
grades of social life ; the corruption of business methods ; the ' false^ fairy gold,' 
of fashionable charities, and * advanced ' thought. Margaret Wentworth is a 
typical New England girl, reflective, absorbed, full of passionate and repressed 
intensity under a quiet and apparently cold exterior. The events that group 
themselves about her life are the natural result of such a character brought into 
contact with real life. The book cannot be too widely read." — Boston Traveller. 

" If the ' What-to-do Club ' was clever, this is decidedly more so. It is a pow- 
erful story, and is evidently written in some degree, we cannot quite say how great 
a degree, from fact. The personages of the story are very well drawn, — indeed, 
■ Amanda Briggs ' is as good as anything American fiction has produced. We 
fancy we could pencil on the margin the real names of at least half the characters. 
It is a book for the wealthy to read that they may know something that is required 
of them, because it does not ignore the difficulties in their way, and especially 
does not overlook the differences which social standing puts between class and 
class. It is a deeply interesting story considered as mere fiction, one of the best 
which has lately appeared. We hope the authoress will go on in a path where 
she has shown herself so capable." — The Churchman. 

"In Mrs. Campbell's novel we have a work that is not to be judged by 
ordinary standards. The story holds the reader's interest by its realistic pictures 
of the local life around us, by its constant and progressive action, and by the 
striking dramatic quality of scenes and incidents, described in a style clear, con- 
nected, and harmonious. The novel-reader who is not taken up and made to 
share the author's enthusiasm before getting half-way through the book must 
possess a taste satiated and depraved by indulgence in exciting and sensational 
fiction. The earnestness of the author's presentation of essentially great purposes 
lends intensity to her narrative. Succeeding as she does in impressing us strongly 
with her convictions, there is nothing of dogmatism in their preaching. But the 
suggestiveness of every chapter is backed by pictures of real life." — Neiv York 
World. % 

Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
price > by the publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. 

THE WHAT-TO-DO CLUB. 

A STORY FOR GIRLS. 

By Helen Campbell. 
i6mo. Cloth. Price $1.50. t 



" • The What-to-do Club ' is an unpretending story. It introduces us to a 
dozen or more village girls of varying ranks. One has had superior opportuni- 
ties ; another exceptional training ; two or three have been ' away to school ; ' 
some are farmers' daughters ; there is a teacher, two or three poor self-support- 
ers, — in fact, about such an assemblage as any town between New York and 
Chicago might give us. But while there is a large enough company to furnish a 
delightful coterie, there is absolutely no social life among them. . . . Town and 
country need more improving, enthusiastic work to redeem them from barrenness 
and indolence. Our girls need a chance to do independent work, to study prac- 
tical business, to fill their minds with other thoughts than the petty doings of 
neighbors. A What-to-do Club is one step toward higher village life. It is one 
step toward disinfecting a neighborhood of the poisonous gossip which floats like 
a pestilence around localities which ought to furnish the most desirable homes in 
our country." — The Chautauquan. 

" 'The What-to-do Club ' is a delightful story for girls, especially for New 
England girls, by Helen Campbell. The heroine of the story is Sybil Waite, the 
beautiful, resolute, and devoted daughter of a broken-down but highly educated 
Vermont lawyer. The story shows how much it is possible for a well-trained and 
determined young woman to accomplish when she sets out to earn her own living, 
or help others. Sybil begins with odd jobs of carpentering, and becomes an artist 
in woodwork. She is first jeered at, then admired, respected, and finally loved 
by a worthy man. The book closes pleasantly with John claiming Sybil as his 
own. The labors of Sybil and her friends and of the New Jersey ' Busy Bodies,' 
which are said to be actual facts, ought to encourage many young women to more 
successful competition in the battles of life." — Golden Rule. 

11 In the form of a story, this book suggests ways in which young women 
may make money at home, with practical directions for so doing. Stories with a 
moral are not usually interesting, but this one is an exception to the rule. The 
narrative is lively, the incidents probable and amusing, the characters well-drawn, 
ard the dialects various and characteristic. Mrs. Campbell is a natural story- 
teller, and has the gift of making a tale interesting. Even the recipes for pickles 
and preserves, evaporating fruits, raising poultry, and keeping bees, are made 
poetk and invested with a certain ideal glamour, and we are thrilled and absorbed 
, by an array of figures of receipts and expenditures, equally with the changeful 
incidents of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony. Fun and pathos, sense and 
sentiment, are mingled throughout, and the combination has resulted in one of 
the brightest stories of the season." — Woman's Journal. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by publishers 9 
KOBERTS BROTHERS. Boston. 






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